Marching Band

Our meeting a couple of weeks ago with the new school nurse also included the band director. Marching band is a serious endeavor in our district. There have been weekly 3 hour rehearsals since June. Band camp week in August consists of twelve hour days at the high school. Our fall weekends are spoken for.  There will be weeks when my daughter spends more time with the band and its staff than she does with us, her beloved (and diabetes-familiar) family.

She's the first kid with diabetes to be in the band, so this is new territory. Both the director and assistant director agreed to be glucagon trained, which is great.  More important to me, though, was to teach and then strategize so that they will never have to use that training.  So we talked about diabetes.  We talked about how steady exercise (like walking and presumably marching) can lead to low blood sugar. We talked about the importance of treating a low blood sugar as soon as it's noticed.  We talked about the importance of checking blood sugar obsessively on days of important events (like band competitions) so that my daughter can use every tool at hand to aim for a in-range number at show-time.  We talked about the importance of keeping diabetes supplies accessible at all times.

The last time we had to explain and discuss diabetes in this kind of detail was at our initial 504 plan meeting at the middle school . The goal of both meetings was, of course, to get the staff to agree to allow my daughter to do what she needed to do to take care of her diabetes.  The tactic we used both time was conversation and education.  More effective than making a list of demands, I think, is to talk about life with diabetes: what a low blood sugar feels like, how it's treated, how we use the tools we have at hand to prevent diabetes emergencies, how good my kid is at taking care of her diabetes with a minimum of disruption, and how much bigger a disruption it would be if an oncoming low turned into a medical emergency.  This information, presented with a healthy dose of 'we've been doing this forever, and we know what we're doing,' seems to slowly but effectively shuffle people's preconceptions about how things should be done and lead to building consensus on a mutually agreeable plan.

The conversation with the band director led to a game plan, to be fine-tuned as events start to unfold.  She will have her meter kit on the sidelines of all rehearsals.  While the director is strict about nobody leaving the lines for any reason during practice, my daughter has permission to slip away to check if the Dexcom alarms or she's feeling low. The band director will carry glucagon and a spare meter in the first aid bag which accompanies him onto the field. At performances she will check her blood sugar during the time just before they enter the field and then hand her kit to the director or a parent volunteer as they line up. The uniform jacket has a pocket in which she can keep a roll of glucose tabs to use in an on-field emergency. The lines of communication remain open and if we have any concerns, we'll bring them up. Ditto for the band director. We left feeling comfortable with the plan.

Next up, how wear the pump and dexcom with the uniform, how to survive a week of band camp in the August sun and how to balance the busy fall band season with the first semester of freshman year of high school...