My Hero

Day 7 of Diabetes Blog Week is (finally?) here.  The prompt goes like this: Let’s end our week on a high note and blog about our “Diabetes Hero”. It can be anyone you’d like to recognize or admire, someone you know personally or not, someone with diabetes or maybe a Type 3. It might be a fabulous endo or CDE. It could be a d-celebrity or role-model. It could be another DOC member. It’s up to you – who is your Diabetes Hero??

This one is easy.

My daughter is my diabetes hero. 

Because she was diagnosed just after her first birthday, she does not remember a day without diabetes.  This often leads me to wonder, in a chicken v. egg sort of way, whether she'd be the same type of person without diabetes.

Would she be so mature for her age?

Would she be as organized?

Would she be as good at math?

Would she be as persistent? Determined? Some might stay stubborn?

Would she be so calm, cool and collected?

Would she be as self-assured, and care so little about what others thought of her?

Whether these are innate qualities, or the result of life with diabetes, we'll never know.  What I do know is that these traits serve her well in living with this menace of a disease.  She plows through the lows and highs of with little complaint, no matter where they occur or how inconvenient. She laughs in the face of spontaneous finger bleeding and marathon shopping trips for pants with big pockets.  She tolerates being poked with more needles in a month than many people experience in a lifetime. These are just fleeting inconveniences to her.  She knows that 'real life' is elsewhere, and is quickly off to enjoy school, friends, family adventures, piano, softball, ballet or duct-tape crafts. 

Earlier this week, I noted that keeping calm and carrying on in the face of diabetes was one thing we do well. Without my daughter's heroic response to it all, we'd be in a completely different boat.