I have been thinking this past week about ‘our’ path since diagnosis. Given everything we have had to endure, we are still smiling and that has to be a good thing.
Last week, Anna attended her first ever camp (Year 10) without my husband and I either collecting each evening to return her the next morning or being close by for the pump change or the ‘just in case’ moments.
This is huge. On ‘our’ path, this took us around 2 1/2 years to get to this point – it was 36 months of education, questions, mistakes, counting, guessing, fingerpricking, pump discontinuations, tears, raised voices, silence, appointments, A1c’s, sick days, CGM changes (and falloff’s), hypo’s, hyper’s, foods, changes in basal rates, changes to insulin to carb ratio’s, growth and unrelenting support to get our daughter to a point where we all felt that she could do this on her own.
When I say ‘do it on her own’, what I mean is that we were 5 hours drive away from our Type 1 Diabetic child (I know!) and in our place, she had an amazing support team of teachers who jumped at the chance to follow her Dexcom data but who at the end of the camp, cried when we thanked them. I think that these 5 days gave a brief window of what managing a Type 1 diagnosis is like – unrelenting, scary, dangerous and chronic.
The week was not perfect and nor did we expect it to be – life isn’t like that, whether you have Type 1 or not. Sure, we calculated the carbs for the menu plan as best we could in preparation, Anna had one severe hypo at 12.58am on the third night and perhaps the numbers ran a little higher than at home but the fact that she did it, is a huge achievement and testament to her courage and ability to manage her condition. I would say all in all, a pretty successful camp.
I am not saying that all camps will be like this one and we all know, Type 1 life changes in a moment – for us though, this is a small step in the right direction along ‘our’ path.