Had a “teaching moment” this morning. Let me set the stage – last night was horrible. Eric had a sudden BG dip at 3:30 a.m. that I caught, by whatever miracle, before he got too low, but neither one of us got back to sleep until almost 5. How Nate slept through it all, I really don’t know, but he did, and this morning was bouncing around celebrating how well he’d slept, and emphasizing that for once, he hadn’t appeared in Mommy’s bed during the night (this is, in fact, a Big Deal, not in any way lessened by the fact that Mommy spent very little time in Mommy’s bed herself). When he asked me if I had slept equally well, I had to say, No, I hadn’t.
“Why not?” he wanted to know. Well, Eric was low last night and we had trouble getting back to sleep. A wise nod; Nate knows all about Eric being low (see prior post). But then he asked a question that threw me: “Mommy, what happens when Eric’s in the middle?”
In the middle? In the middle of what?
“You know, when he’s not high, but he’s not low.”
Well, that was certainly a good question. I explained to Nate that the middle was where most people were, people like him, and me, and Daddy, and Big Sister Kayla and Big Brother Tom. You see, I told him, everybody has this thing called a pancreas in their tummy, and the pancreas is what keeps us all from going high and low like Eric does. The job of a pancreas is to make insulin so that you never have too much or too little sugar in your blood. Eric’s pancreas doesn’t work right, so that’s why he has an insulin pump, only his insulin pump doesn’t always work as well as a pancreas would, so he sometimes goes up and down anyway. You know how sometimes he’ll grab a juicebox and sluuuuurp it up really fast? That’s because the sugar in his blood is low, and he needs the sugar in the juicebox to get it back up to that middle place. And other times, he eats a lot and if Mommy doesn’t give him insulin with his pump, his sugar goes really high and he feels sick until Mommy presses the pump buttons and gives him the insulin to bring him back down to that middle place. You and Daddy and Thomas and Kayla and Mommy too, we all have working pancreases that do all that for us, but he doesn’t. That’s what’s called diabetes.
“I have a pan-ker-us too?”
Yes. You have one, and so does Eric, and the rest of us too – we all have one. Just some people, like Eric, have one that doesn’t quite do what it’s supposed to.
“And it’s in my tummy?”
Yes.
“I like having a pan-ker-us in my tummy, Mom,” he said solemnly.
Me, too.
