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Rusty's Ramblings

Published:
1-Feb-2005

The other day I received a call from my daughter Kari at school. For those of you who don't know, Kari is 10 years old and a Type 1 Diabetic. She's currently using an insulin pump. She told me she had just checked her blood glucose level and it was 448. I told her to dial up a correction and waited for the pump to figure out how much insulin she needed. Pumps are wonderful although they're kind of like calculators. After you use a calculator for a while you forget your multiplication tables. She's been on the pump for several months and I don't have the automatic correction amounts in my head anymore. I have to multiply.

You can see my dilemma. Anyway, the pump tells us she needs an 8.65 unit insulin correction. I tell her to dial it up, hit the "go" button, and call me back in twenty minutes. Twenty minutes later she calls back at 468. Okay, site failure. I head over to her school to insert a new infusion set. Sort of like an IV in her belly. I insert the new set and she starts to howl that it hurts. This happens once in a blue moon. You just take it out and re-do it with another set. When she takes it out this huge gout of blood comes out and starts running all over. This has never happened before. The school nurse is scrambling for gauze pads, and I'm trying to keep her from getting blood all over everything. We get her cleaned up and a new infusion set inserted. Twenty minutes later she's 80 points lower and dropping. She goes back to class and I go back to work.

Fast forward to about 6:30 that evening. I'm watching TV with my youngest daughter Kristin, she's 8. We're watching CSI re-runs because Kristin loves them. (Yes I'm careful about the subject matter she sees) All of a sudden there's this blood-curdling shout from the bathroom where Kari is. "Daddy! There's blood on my panties". Kristin and I both look at each other with our mouths open, thinking the exact same thought from two completely different points of view. Kristin is thinking "Oh my gosh, how exciting, Kari is getting her period"! I'm thinking "Oh my gosh, what am I going to do? Kari is getting her period"! We both race out of the den, sending the beaded curtain flying, rush through the kitchen, storm down the hall to the bathroom door. The whole time I'm thinking, "I'm not prepared for this, I'm not prepared for this. I have to go get her pads, I have to call my sister, How am I going to handle this"? Kristin is half a step behind me the whole way gleefully shouting at the top of her lungs "puberty, puberty, puberty"! We come to a screeching halt at the bathroom door only to hear roaring laughter coming from inside. Kari says to me "ha ha daddy, it's only the blood from my site this morning. I got a little on the waistband of my underwear, but I had you going"! Ha ha what a jolly little joker she's turned out to be. Well she gets this kind of sense of humor from me so once my heart rate dropped and I could breathe again it was pretty funny. The two of them have been teasing me about the look on my face ever since.

It did get me thinking though. Sometimes we get so caught up being the parent of a diabetic child we forget that's not all they are. Diabetes isn't the end-all it's only part-of. I have a daughter who's not going to be a little girl much longer. She's going to be a young woman. A diabetic young woman, but that's just a small part of the over all person she is. When she grows up she'll probably be a comedienne.

Just a dopey father,

Rusty

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