This week has felt like one of the longest weeks ever. The sun is just rising on a crisp, clear, Thursday morning and it feels more like next Thursday already. It's been a whirlwind of a week and sanity is beginning to elude me. For three nights in a row, sleep has been either elusive or intermittently interrupted to take blood sugars readings from my son, the occasional overnight insulin injection, or simply not being able to sleep due to a wildly thrown off schedule and largely inadequate sleep arrangements. But, as I have held in front of me all week and continue to hold onto as a bastion of hope is that things could always be worse. I could be here with my dying son instead of my son who we now need to work with to ensure a vibrant, mostly normal life. I could also be in this situation with my son at a younger age, unable to understand the full ramifications of all that is going on around him and in him. And yet, even at 5 years old, the complete understanding has not yet taken hold and I'm sure it will take a while for it to fully sink in. But I start as the week is almost at an end and we are the verge of going home today and beginning the process of learning from home.
It started over a week ago with the symptoms that my son exhibited. There was a slow decrease in energy, an excessive intake of water to the tune of 20 ounces an hour accompanied by frequent trips to use the bathroom, and leg pain. It all came to a head a week ago when my wife called the doctor and asked what we should do. Upon hearing the symptoms, our doctor said we needed to get blood work done first thing Friday morning. Our doctor didn't get the results back until early Monday morning at which point she called my wife at work and told her she needed to pull our son from school and get him the ER immediately. As it would turn out over the course of that Monday, 4 days which feels more like 4 weeks at this point, our son has Type I diabetes. Believe it or not, it was a relief to hear that. It is a manageable condition, albeit a lifelong one, but much better than the alternative outcomes of the symptoms he was exhibiting. Those much more disastrous alternatives ranged from bone cancer to leukemia to anemia. I will take Type 1 Diabetes over any of those, any day. That is the primary reason I have been able to hold such a positive outlook through all of this. This is merely a gently, slow curve ball that life has thrown our way. Even better is the fact that our currently lifestyle already consists of healthy eating, very little sugar, and a desire to do what's best for our family.
Yet, for the foreseeable future, I will be sleep deprived. Our son's blood sugar, while getting more normal is still all over the place and I will need to be up every three hours over night for the next week and a half to figure out his system and what we will need to do. Luckily for me, I can fall asleep within minutes most of the time and functioning at work necessitates only holding a brush and taping knife, and not much interaction with people. So luckily, I can let my brain merely cope with getting me through the day and not focus on having high level conversations with people. I'm sure I will have more to write, and there is plenty more that I want to say, but my son just woke up in his hospital bed and its on to another day. We are all well, though, breathing and getting back to normal, and are looking forward to heading home today.
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