A previous post was about fastballs. This post is about the curveball. At this rate, I’m going to become an expert at baseball… or certainly baseball analogies! This may be helpful with our pending move to the US.
Callum was admitted to hospital recently. He had been ‘off’ for a few days and I just knew that something wasn’t right by the third day when he was the colour of ash and was curled into a ball on the bathroom floor, intermittently clinging to the toilet bowl. As life would have it, Marcus had had his work send off the night before so he was a little worse for wear and I wasn’t certain if the hospital would end up admitting both son and father. So I left the father at home to fend for himself.
It turns out that Callum has Type 1 diabetes. In this past week our lives have been overturned as we recover from the shock of this diagnosis. There is no history on either side, there were no symptoms other than that he’d been drinking lots of water and peeing a lot, and in hindsight, he’d lost a lot of weight. But it had been Christmas and he’d been mucking around non-stop with his cousins and friends. Callum will be dependent on insulin for the rest of his life, until someone can find a cure for it.
I am a basket case. It breaks my heart that my little boy has to face this. No 9 year old should be dealing with their mortality.
Callum is the champion. He is extraordinary.
- He is a super, resilient kid.The great thing is that he can still eat whatever he wants but he has to time when he eats it and how much of it he eats. He can still go to birthday parties and eat sausage rolls and cake. He can still keep doing all the sport that he wants. He can still become a Supreme Court Judge or play soccer for Liverpool. It’s all a matter of management and for him to learn how to manage it himself. Already he is doing his own blood glucose tests.
School hasn’t started yet and Marcus is still around for a few weeks as he continues to wait for his visa to get the US. Little blessings that I’m happy to take at the moment.
I’m not going to spruik. But here is the link to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation jdrf.org.
HUGE SHOUTS OUTS TO:
- Box Hill Hospital Paediatric ED team particularly Dr Archie and Nurse Bon who managed to unravel my garble and pick up on the T1D.
- the ICU and DACS teams at Monash Children’s Hospital – Meagan, Renata, Adam, Belinda, Tracy and Jacky and all the other extremely calm nurses who helped me hold my shit together in the first 72 hours
The Dewmini Life 