Days after we got home, life didn’t turn back to normal. My first day back at school, I felt shy arriving at the curb. I was late; I slept in today, so thankfully no one would see me outside. I hadn’t been in class for over a week, from staying home sick to going to the hospital. 5th grade social status, in hindsight, is not the pinnacle of importance, but it was all I knew back then, and I didn’t know what people would say. I brought with me to school my regular backpack, and on my side, a small new single strap 2 liter hiking backpack with a small red cross pendant on it (since then, I’ve gone through four of those “glucose bags” as they wore out, and they’ve stayed my reliable companion). Since I was late, I walked in through the heavy metal door at the main entrance to get to the front office and sign in. The lovely receptionists I had known for years welcomed me with smiles, but it wasn’t them I was hoping to impress. Classes had already started, so I stalked through the empty halls, not wanting to bring attention to myself. I quietly hung up my backpack in my cubby, but when I approached my class’ door, I hesitated again. I looked down at my bright red medicine bag. Couldn’t I just leave it in the cubby where no one would see it? I hung my head; no, I’ve had this argument with my parents already, I need it in class so I can use it. I took a deep breath, and walked in the door.
Mrs. Jones, at the front of the class, exploded into a smile, the first one to see me come in. “Everyone, Kaelan’s back from the hospital, everyone say hi!” Everyone turned in their seats. I got fidgety at the door, suddenly the center of attention. My glucose bag was heavy in my hand. In less than a second, my mind shot around through a racecourse of embarrassment, shame, and awkwardness, over and over and over again. The tension finally broke in my head when a chorus of hollers and greetings came from the whole class, even people I wasn’t friends with. I got a few hugs, and a lot of “we missed you”. Apparently, I wasn’t a freak yet; I breathed out a little of my nervousness. It was a nice moment to be back. In my desk, there was a note over my books: “Hope you’re back soon – S”.
The next few days were full of strings of questions from classmates who had never heard of diabetes before, or if they did, had a lot of misconceptions about it. It wasn’t my job to educate them, but I did anyway. In the end, I found it was better that I answered all the questions than let their imaginations run wild; I remember one guy from my class refused to let me sit at his table because he thought diabetes was contagious. It turns out years later another classmate of mine got diagnosed with Type 1 as well, and I can only hope that by ameliorating some of the ignorance in the community about the disease helped him have to confront less people who didn’t understand what he had. For a couple days I was a minor celebrity, and I’ll admit it was a nice subversion of my expectation.
We only had a month left of school by the time I came back, but I learned a lot in that time away from home. When I started coming back to school, even though I had my stuff with me at all times, I always went to the nurse’s office when I wanted to test or dose because I felt shy about doing it in class. There were upsides: it felt nice to be able to leave class with a medical reason sometimes, even if it meant I had to stick a needle in my skin. I’ll admit though, even when I had a perfectly good reason to leave, I always felt oddly guilty pulling the diabetic card. I remember, my first ever low I caught as a diabetic I was in class. I was working on a project with a friend of mine, and I realized while I was typing that I was making a bunch of errors, because…wait, my hands were shaking. I never had steady hands, but this was next level. In the back of my mind, I remembered a graphic that a nurse had shown me about all the common symptoms of low blood sugars, and one of them was trembling hands, and lack of coordination. I asked to excuse myself, and head to the office. I did the finger poke, milked the finger, and tested.
…
…
53?!? I had never been that low! I was excited, but also nervous. Uhh, I need to have carbs now, l think. The doctors said 15, so let’s look here, uhhhh… Oh! I measured out four glucose tablets, and ate them. Now we wait I guess. 15 minutes later, I tested again, and I was over 70 again. Huh, that was actually pretty easy; look at me go. Oddly enough, it gave me a bit of confidence to be able to do that on my own, even though it was so simple. I never thought about what caused the low, or what I should have done to prevent it. I hadn’t gotten there yet in my processes, but it felt good to be independent, and still have a handle on my disease, even when things went wrong.
At lunch, every day the kitchens served something different, so I started taking cold lunches, since that way I could know beforehand what to dose for. I would have a sandwich, some veggies on the side, and a clementine. I’d test and dose right before I ate, and then sat at the lunch table with my friends. For a while, we tried hot lunches, but they were so unpredictable we had to go back. I can’t lie, I got sick of having the same meal everyday, but until we could learn to deal with something else, that’s just the way it had to be.
Four weeks later, the system had become rather monotonous, and I wrapped up the school year with the rest of my class like we did every year, with a Celebration Day. In the end, a lot changed, but school was still school, and my friends were still my friends.
Growing up T1D 