In the first week after K got back from the hospital, the annual school overnight trip to Camp Minikani was happening. This entailed 3 days in shared dorm style cabins at a really nice YMCA camp in rural Wisconsin with lots of carb dense food, camp fires, and smores and all. We were still a bit shell shocked and terrified. How would it work? Who would make sure he tested regularly? Would he know what to do if he was low or high? But we had committed to letting him do everything other kids do, so now was the time to put up or shut up.
Buuuuuuuut there is still an overwhelming sense of fear early on that you can’t just trust the system to take care of your kid who is now truly vulnerable to both over or undereating on a school trip. He was game, but no expert on diabetes, so we decided he needed a safety net. And that was me. I cancelled a business trip and signed up as a chaperone for the 3 day Minikani adventure. The slots were all filled, but the school understood the impulse and squeezed me in. I would be around at mealtimes and could check on him before he went to bed, and would hopefully be able to pull this off without him dying of humiliation, because really, what kid wants their mother hovering on a 5th grade trip? But at this early stage of our diabetes journey, those were the terms we set for his participation.
One of the things that reassured me during the trip was that people who knew him could see when he was getting out of whack in terms of bg. One of his friends had a mother who was a nurse, and as we were walking to the dining hall for lunch one day, she said “Kaelan, I think you need to test”. He did and he was quite low. She shared with me that she heard him being rude to someone, and she knew right away that this was not like him, so she figured he was low. His bg excursions out of range were observable, I learned. He was testy, or clammy, or jittery, or spacy, and it helped to know that there were signs that could be interpreted.
In the end I was really glad I went, because although I tried to fade into the background, I did get to see him at a safe distance being a normal 5th grader. He went on hikes, played capture the flag, paddled in the canoes, did frisbee golf, met large winged predators in a lecture, and snakes I think too. He played Gaga ball, a kind of dodge ball in a circular court, and he was actually one of the few kids who made it to the top of the rock climbing wall to ring the bell. It’s ridiculous I know, but that actually brought me to tears, which fortunately no one saw. You want so many things for your kids. You don’t want them to miss out on anything in life. This was a glimpse of him being normal or even “above average” as Garrison Keillor likes to say.
Growing up T1D 