Blindsided

When I started this blog over a year ago, I thought the title of "Our Simple Life" was pretty accurate.  Life was wonderful yet very basic.  Avery and I would wake up every morning, send Daddy off to work, do some laundry, run some errands, play outside.  Basically whatever we felt like doing, we were able.  I don't plan on changing the name of this blog, but life as we know it has defnitely changed for the rest of our lives.

A week ago Wednesday, the day of my last blog entries, I ended up taking Avery to see the doctor.  We had noticed over the past week or so, her water intake had increased dramatically and she had a lot more wet diapers.  We initially attributed this to the warmer weather and playing a little harder outside.  After several days of wondering if this was actually the reason, I decided to go ahead and call the doctor to see if it was cause for concern.  Dr. Thomas thought her intake sounded like a bit much, so we went down to do some bloodwork.  His original concern was that she might be anemic, but we ended up finding out much more.  The results came in and it turns out our 21 month old has Type 1 Diabetes.  We had to take her to Wichita immediately for care in the Pediatric ICU to work on getting her blood glucose levels down and Chris and I were to start having diabetes educators come in to give us a crash course on raising a child with diabetes.  We ended up staying at Wesley until Saturday morning,

Our initial reaction was about as bad as one could imagine; how could it be possible that our beautiful, perfect little girl who had never done a thing to deserve it could end up being diagnosed with a lifelong disease?  Chris and I would take her place in a heartbeat if we could.  I know I haven't always taken the best care of myself, making poor decisions about my health and lifestyle, yet I'm not the one who has to get her finger pricked 10-12 times a day, with 4 different shots of insulin daily.  We are the ones who are old enough to understand what all this means, but she is the one who must figure out that Mommy and Daddy are doing their best to take care of her and would never intentionally hurt her.  She has been so brave this entire time.  At the hospital, she would walk up and down the hall saying hi to anyone and everyone.  Since we've been home, she has only cried a couple of times after getting her shots, and actually wants to help with checking her blood sugar.  It's so much for her to handle, yet she does it with such grace and ease.

The road so far has been a little rocky; we have already switched doctors once because we weren't too thrilled with the one we initially started with.  We are still working on dosing and ratios and figuring out what foods are working better than others, but we understand it's all a learning process.  The past couple of days seem to have gone a little better; nights are still scary because her glucose level continues to drop in the middle of the night. We have been in contact with on-call nurses and the doctor's office, so hopefully between these resources, it's only a matter of time before everything begins to click.

In the meantime, Avery continues to amaze us all with how utterly invincible she is.  We always knew she was a strong, independent little thing, but Chris and I were definitely not prepared for her to have to demonstrate these traits at such a young age.  We have a lot to learn from her.  We are continuing to take each day one day at a time and we know Avery will continue to teach us all about the personal strength she has that we are striving for.