dollhouse days

I can’t remember when my brothers stopped holding my hands while my mom would give me shots. I can’t say for certain if it had anything to do with when I noticed myself becoming less afraid but I like to think that it did. As I felt myself feeling braver and getting stronger, I think that they felt that shift too.

For someone who used to hate needles I learned very early on that the hard part wasn’t the shots themselves but all that came with it. The frustration that came along with a day full of high numbers. The preparation that came with simply going out to see a movie and needing a laundry list of supplies. The incessant thoughts that would flood my brain the second my head hit the pillow. 

What if I go low in the middle of the night and everyone is sound asleep, unable to hear my cries for help. 

What if I accidentally over count my carbs and give myself too much insulin. 

What if my sugar goes low before my test and I have to interrupt the class by stepping out. 

What if I pass out and no one around me knows why, leaving me there alone and unconscious. 

The shots were painless. My mom and I developed a system. She would count down 3, 2, 1 and then inject after one. I would count with her and then scrunch up my face as soon as she hit one. Ready to fully embrace the impact. My mom would then say all done, always catching me off guard because I rarely felt a thing. As time went on and I got further away from my life before needles, I grew more and more confident in my ability to handle it. The steps became second nature and I became an amateur expert in carb counting and basic math.

I still have vivid memories of those first few months. Our dining room table was now a one stop diabetes shop. Right before my diagnosis my mom had moved our dollhouse to the dining room table for the summer. She had intended to fix it up and wanted to encourage my sister and I to play with it. Life had other plans and our dollhouse became storage for needles and empty insulin pens. Stuffed animals lived in the attic providing quick access to something to squeeze. 

Over a decade has passed and some days I feel like diabetes has won. It’ll be 12pm and my numbers will have consistently been in the 200s — seemingly no amount of insulin is able to bring it down. Sometimes I find myself missing the beginning dollhouse days when my three year old brothers would run into the dining room with a stuffed teddy bear and offer up their tiny little hand ready for me to squeeze. 

But then I’m reminded of how far I’ve come, how much I’ve grown. I am so lucky to have always had such a strong support system. Instead of hand holding and teddy bears, I am now occasionally greeted with concerned questions or a simple “are you ok?” They never hesitate to run me a juice box when I’m low or grab my meter from my room because I feel too dizzy to get up. I will never forget the dollhouse days but I’m grateful to have our dining room table back and to have come up with a much better organization system for my diabetes supplies.