Looking back, I was very lucky to get diagnosed when I did. I was still in middle school, and although my family’s first priority has always been education, my classes weren’t all that important yet, and I could take some time to learn the ropes. More pertinently, summer came soon after my diagnosis, and I had time to learn how the hell my body worked.
My first summer with Diabetes was filled with all the regular summer stuff: video games, playing Yu-Gi-Oh, reading fantasy, and hanging out with friends. However, I had to balance this with picking up diabetes.
As much as dosing a static amount of insulin and counting 60-70 carbs every meal worked, it’s frankly not sustainable. At the start of summer, I was still using a little light blue booklet to write down everything I ate, how many carbs it had, what I tested at before every meal, and how much I dosed for mealtimes and for my basal. It was getting a little beat up, but it was simple, and the routine was comforting. Sometimes we had trouble coming up with 60-70 carbs every meal, since our standard meals were pretty protein heavy, but all in all, I could add some corn, milk, or fruit on a repeatable basis and make it work.
Clearly though, I wasn’t always going to want to have 60-70 carbs. What if I wanted to go to a party, or what if I didn’t want to eat so much? Lucky for me, Children’s hospital offered Diabetes 101 classes for newly diagnosed diabetics, and my parents signed me up for all of them. I wasn’t too psyched to be back at a medical facility after my last experience, but it was helpful that we weren’t in the actual medical wards. They brought us into a little white meeting room with a huge long table. There were two other families there, kids that had been diagnosed at around the same time as me.
We went around the table, and shared before the class started. It was weird, we all had different stories of lives and diagnoses, but we all understood each other a lot more deeply than you normally would. I would learn this over my time as a diabetic: whenever you meet another one, you already have an idea of what they’re like, because you go through the same processes every day. At home, they had different experiences though. They both used syringes, and one still wasn’t injecting himself with his insulin, which I didn’t really get, but I respected.
After a few minutes of icebreakers around the table, the two nurses leading the class started lecturing us. At first, I was a little listless because it was a review of what I already knew, but then it started getting interesting. We started talking about different types of carbs, and their different effects. We talked about how tests can have inaccuracies if done wrong, and processes with ketones and glucagon.
These classes continued throughout the first couple months of summer, and they helped develop out of my crutches as a diabetic. Soon, I was counting carbs, and dosing appropriately with the insulin to carb ratios that I had calculated. I was correcting high blood sugars even when I wasn’t eating, and eating a more precise amount of carbs for lows than the standard 15g every time. I felt a lot more in control, although still a little lost. In the end, today I don’t follow all the advice they gave me then, I’ve since grown out of it, but it gave me the boost I needed to start making my own habits and processes when it comes to diabetes.
Later that summer, I went back to my favorite summer camp: Camp Whitcomb. This was the day camp where I learned to play Yu-Gi-Oh and Gaga-ball, the two games of my childhood. I went just like I did every year, but this time I brought with me my test kit, insulin and sugar. My counselors had been informed of my diagnosis, and I showed up just like I was used to. I laughed, I played, and I had carbs when I was low. It felt nice, being back at a place I loved so much, it reminded me once again of a fact that was hard to remember: that life went on, diabetic or not. I remember one of my counselors was alone with me once when I tested a low blood sugar, and while I was waiting for my carbs to work, she revealed to me that she had reactive hypoglycemia, so she kind of understood what I was going through.
Growing up T1D 