Jenga (Or How Diabetes Is Balanced)

Regulated.

Scheduled.

Automatic.

Easy.

Those words have either been spoken to me or actually pleaded by my own mouth at one time or another during the course of our journey with diabetes.  Specifically in ways like this...

Won't it get easier once your daughter is regulated?  Or have you tried to put her on a schedule.  I think that would make it easy.

When is it going to get easy?  I just want our life back.  How come I can't get her regulated?  I have us on a schedule and I thought it would be automatic.  This is never going to be easy.

The thing is that none of those terms exist.  Not in our world anyway.  And that is truly the sad truth of living with type 1 diabetes.  While our friends outside our world find reprieves by taking a pill or walking around the block or even going on the dreaded schedule, none of that works for us.

We just simply try to the best we can and we never, ever give up trying.

Man, that is depressing.

You are probably wondering why I am even bringing it up.  After all, this is a lesson that we had to learn over five years ago.  So why now?

Well, my youngest daughter missed two more days of school due to strep throat.   Almost as soon as the penicillin entered her body, she started to feel better, but as she was still contagious to her classmates, I opted to keep her home.  (insert "your welcome" to the remain 25 sets of parents!)  To fill our time, we played Jenga.  A whole lot of Jenga. 

After a few games, I noticed that she was placing her blocks as carefully as she did for the first game.  This was in spite of the fact that she was very clear on the end result; eventually there would be a tumble of blocks onto the table. 

But she didn't care.  It was important enough for her to keep trying to stack those blocks, even though they wouldn't be regulated, scheduled, easy or even automatically able to stay up on the tower.  She didn't care about the crash or the tumble or having to clean the pieces up once again. 

All she cared about was the fun along the journey and having special time with her mom.  And maybe a little bit about the potential to have a small victory against those silly blocks.

And you know what?  That's what I care about too.  Even though none of this is easy and we have moments where everything crashes down on us, I care about my family more than enough to overlook those moments. 

I want all of us to enjoy our journey and our life and to look back with pride and happiness for what we have accomplished.

And I want to beat type 1 diabetes too.