GOING BLUE! HOW ABOUT YOU?

We are GOING BLUE!!!



Wendy did such a good job with her post about this, I swiped it from her.  Is it stealing if I say she wrote it and give her all the credit? Probably....oh well.  Hopefully, she will forgive me this time. :)

World Diabetes Day is November 14th. In honor of this occasion, Joanne got the ball rolling to create some Tshirts for us to wear....imagine it: TYPE 1 DIABETES being represented all over BlogLand in matching shirts!

It's a beautiful thing. But we have to ACT FAST. In order to get the shirts printed and delivered by 11/14, we need to get the orders rolling. STAT!!!!  (Tired Mom interjects: Wendy is a nurse. She gets to use cool medical terms like STAT.)

So here's the scoop:

We are happy to announce that the price for the shirts will be $15... and that's including taxes and shipping! For any Canadian peeps, it will be $20. Sorry to do that to you, but it's the shipping that kills you. This is the design we're going with:



So, here's what I need from you; if you want to order a shirt (or shirts!), please send an email to: shirts@helpmefred.com with the number of shirts you want, and the sizes you need, plus the address you want it shipped to. You can order unisex(S - XXL), woman's sizes (S - XL), as well as kid's (2/4 - 14/16).

You will then need to send us the money for the shirts via Paypal (very easy and totally secure, I use it all the time). To send money, all you have to do is go to http://www.paypal.com/, click on send money, and enter the email address above in the "To" line.

And that's it, folks. So get those orders in and let's TURN THE WORLD BLUE!!!!!!!!!

Once again, thanks Wendy for the blog entry, and thanks Joanne for getting the BLUE ball rolling!

Got sneakers?

I have about 40 of the JDRF sneaker car magnets in green that I volunteered to sell for our local JDRF chapter.  These are the green magnets that say "Help Find A Cure for Type 1 Diabetes". 

If you are interested in purchasing one, or a dozen :), let me know.  Magnets are $3 each, 2 for $5 plus 50 cents shipping/handling each. Sorry for the crummy picture; I had to use my cell phone camera.
ALL money goes to the Desert Southwest Chapter of JDRF

Awareness, anyone?

World Diabetes Day is coming up soon - November 14th.  Think about the people you know. How many people really understand the difference between type 1 and Type 2?  Well, from personal experience I can say NOT VERY DANG MANY.  (disclaimer:  before Type 1 came to live in our house, I knew a little - now I know far more than I ever wanted to know.)  We have been fairly fortunate with not getting the "She can grow out of it" or "She just ate too much sugar; if she exercises it will go away" types of comments.  There have been some but not too many. 

However, there are FAR too many PoCWDs who have absolutely AWFUL, TERRIBLE things said to them about (and to) their children.  I mean, really - would you walk up to a child who was bald due to chemotherapy and ask her what she ate that gave her cancer, or tell her she just needs a special juice supplement to make it all better? 


Parents of children with Type 1 want to turn the world blue, just like those who support breast cancer research have turned the world pink.  (Please note - we are NOT saying that breast cancer is an unworthy cause by any means....we just want to raise diabetes awareness to the same kind of level.)  Thanks to Joanne, the idea of a tshirt like the one pictured above may just help us spread the message!!  As soon as the details are finalized,  these will be made up and the education campaign will begin!!


If you are in to help spread the T1 awareness message, blog it, post it on FB, tweet about it - whatever you need to do to get the word out.   We're out to turn the world BLUE!

Happy fall (break) , y'all ...sniff, sneeze

It's finally cooling off here in the 7th circle of Hell, aka central Arizona.   Mid October, and the temps are finally in the double digits rather than triple....bringing with them the cool mornings and hot afternoons that require jackets over shorts and tshirts.  I'll take that over 115 any day.  We're sitting with the doors and windows open tonight, a nice cool breeze coming through to take away the "heat" of the day.  It was about 85 indoors at one point, but I was steadfast and did NOT turn the a/c back on.  We have about 6 months of electric bills that are enormously inflated by a/c use, so I try to really keep it off once we shut it down. Generally speaking we are the opposite of the majority of the nation - our heating bills are not the huge ones.  It's the "summer", which generally begins somewhere around April Fool's Day and lasts until the end of September.  

The temperature changes have brought allergy/flu junk along with them.  It seems that Missy Miss has some version of the flu, or some other ugly, nasty virus.   We came home from  the Children With Diabetes conference in La Jolla and she promptly developed a sore throat....two days later, fever and a deep chest cough. She's been sleeping like mad and her blood sugars, well, SUCK.  I've been running a temp rate of 130% to 150% to keep her semi-down to normal....Otherwise it's nothing but 250s and up.   So far the rest of us haven't had much, just slight sore throats and sniffles.  I'm hoping we all can stave off the germs.  Vitamins and LOTS of hand-washing...

The hubs is having more stomach issues.  He went for an ultrasound last week, and this week I get to take him for an endoscopy.  The GI doc thinks it's his gallbladder....which wouldn't be too shocking considering his diet and lifestyle. :)  He doesn't have stomach pain so much as chest pain, which is a little (lot) scary.  He's had enough cardiac exams and tests to know that it's not actually his heart now, which led to trying stomach meds and finally going to the GI.   No one in my family can have normal symptoms; we all have to have freakishly strange things that make figuring out the problem more challenging, and stressful.

More on the CWD conference later this week; since it's Fall Break (woo hoo!) I have some time to try to update the blog more than once a month.  :)

Ever have one of those....

days, weeks, months?

Sigh.

It's been one of them and THEN some lately.

Here's hoping that things will be turning around and the silver linings will become more apparent to me - because right now, I'm having a hard time seeing past the gray clouds.

I know I'm not the only one who feels like this, and I know I have plenty of things to be happy about - the blessings really do abound in my life.  I have to refocus on those.  

Sometimes I just need a reminder.

hhttp://www.hanifworld.com/sky/43-Amazing light rays.html

Four years ago

I have a hard time believing that it was only four years ago that our world changed so dramatically.
August 23, 2005...a date that lives in infamy in my brain. I'm too fried at the moment to write a coherent post, so I'm revising a message I posted last year to our local support group.

Miss M and two Backstreet Boys at Phoenix Children's Hospital, Aug. 2005
(notice the bandaids? she collected one for every finger poke and shot back then)


Four years ago, my husband, daughter and I were sitting in the pediatrician's office waiting to find out why Miss M was losing weight and peeing all the time. I knew in my heart what it was, even though my head and my husband were telling me that everything would be fine and it was something simple.

After a simple urine dip, we knew she had diabetes. The nurse practitioner came back and said that they were waiting on a call-back from the hospital on whether or not we could drive her there ourselves, or if she needed to be taken in an ambulance. I was so confused - there wasn't anything WRONG with her, why would she need an ambulance? After the PNP left, M started to cry, and it took all I could NOT to cry. She was scared - she knew something was wrong, and wanted to know if it was going to hurt, whatever they were going to do. She didn't want to go to the hospital. Because my college friend Jenny's son had been diagnosed a few years before, I knew that we were looking at three days or more at the hospital.

I excused myself, went outside the building, and called my in-laws to see if they could come to Phoenix to stay with Mister Boychild while we took her to the hospital. Honestly, I just needed to get out of the exam room; I felt as if all the oxygen had been sucked out and I couldn't get my breath. I needed to go outside and have a minor breakdown and then pull it all back together. I remember the absolute SILENCE on the end of the phone when I said those words I had been dreading - M has been just been diagnosed with diabetes. My father-in-law has been dealing with type 2 for years, and at that moment, I didn't really know what we were going to face with her, except that it was going to need insulin. I don't think my mother-in-law knew what to say, either.

It turned out that there were no beds available, so they sent us home to wait for a call from the doctor on call to come down later that night. We packed her a bag, called family to tell them what was happening, and decided that it would be better to keep our son with us and on his normal school schedule. He had just started first grade, and Miss M third. The fabulous and wonderful Dr. D. called to tell us to come down - our first conversation - and I asked what she could eat, because the poor girl was "soooooooooo hungry", another one of the symptoms that I had ignored or explained away to myself. She told us to have some milk, a cheese stick, or some peanut butter crackers, foods which we would come to be very familiar with for snacking in the days and weeks ahead. By 6 PM, we were installed in a room at the children's hospital, telling the story AGAIN of what had brought us to the doctor that day. Miss M had her first finger poke before dinner (somewhere in the mid-400's.....I have no real recollection of the number, because it all is a blur) and her first shot of insulin after dinner.

I wound up snuggling up to my little girl in her hospital bed, trying not to jostle the IV in her hand that had been so painfully inserted at midnight. (We had not yet heard of EMLA) It took 3 hospital staffers AND me to hold her down to get the IV placed, in that "cheerfully painted' room with jungle animals on the walls and glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. She was slightly dehydrated and had large ketones, so getting fluids into (and out of) her was a major goal.

1 AM brought another finger poke with one of those prehistoric one-use lancets; she left many bloody spots on the hospital sheets that night. I could hear the night nurse calling the endo on call, asking if Miss M should have another shot of insulin since her BG was 300+, even though it hadn't been ordered. I had yet to learn what the "right" range was, but 300 was obviously NOT where it needed to be.

The next three days were a blur of information-packed days and sleepless nights. Crying in the shower in the parents' bathroom down the hall (recommended by the kind and supportive resident, Dr. G). The Dear Husband would take Mr. Boychild to school, come to the hospital for training, go back and pick up MB, then bring him back to the hospital so we could have all dinner together. Miss M loved getting to call "room service" for her meals, or for a snack whenever she wished - the rest of us made do with cafeteria fare.She thought the hospital was a great place, full of toys and games and people bringing her presents.....she wasn't "sick", she was having a new adventure.

Bringing her home after 3 full days and nights in the hospital was scarier than the day we brought her home the first time. I didn't understand how they could be sending us out into the world to deal with this disease when we had NO idea what we were doing. Now I know that we had it SOOOO much easier than those who had babies diagnosed, but at that time I just kept going back and forth between wondering why she couldn't have just broken her arm and being thankful she didn't have cancer. Cancer seemed so much scarier.....

Fast forward to 2009. The Dear Husband and I are now full-fledged members of the Amateur Endocrinologist's Club, doing our best to be a functional pancreas for our daughter. We are living our "new normal". Miss M is a happy, healthy pre-teen. She's half again as tall as she was at diagnosis, and weighs more than twice what she did 4 years ago. She's on a new pump (the OmniPod is her second insulin pump) , we have a continuous glucose monitor that I dearly love and she hates, a group of wonderful friends who understand completely what this journey has been like and continues to be, and many more friends who, while they don't LIVE this journey, support us in every way possible. So I say today to you all, "THANK YOU". Thanks for being there when I needed to vent; thanks for listening when I cry; thanks for being there when I have questions; thanks for just being there. Thank you to each and every one of you who comes to our fundraisers, walks around at Tempe Town Lake with us no matter how warm it is, wears our team t-shirts, and lets me ramble on about diabetes even if it makes no sense to you whatsoever. Being alone with this is just not something that I could bear; I need and am grateful for the support, friendship and love of family members, friends (both old and new, both local and "virtual").

If you've read this far, wow. You have stamina. :) If you're still reading, please visit watch this video on the Artificial Pancreas Project - the next step to a more normal life for those with Type 1 diabetes. It's not a cure by any means, but it's a giant step forward in normalizing blood sugars and avoiding complications. Those of you who are local, please join with us and 20,000 of our closest friends and relatives at this year's JDRF Walk to Cure Diabetes at Tempe Town Lake on October 31. It's my sincere hope that I won't have to keep writing this same type of post year after year after year......I want to be able to write a post that says "She's CURED".

So it's been a while..

Yeah, well. I'm all aflutter with the beginning of a new school year, buried in meetings and paperwork and trying to figure out how to put too many desks in a too-small room (with not enough air conditioning).

So for your amusement while you wait for me to come up with an ACTUAL blog post, here's a meme. Stolen from Kris, who got it from someone else, who probably got it from someone else, and so on, and so on. (How old am I, that I reference that shampoo commercial? Geez)

8 Things I...

am looking forward to

• cooler weather
• my kids coming home from grandma's house
• a paycheck after a summer without one
• the cookout with my side of the family this weekend
  
• meeting the kids in my class
  
• the JDRF walk (October 31, Tempe Town Lake)
• having my room completely ready for the first day of school
  
• putting my head on my pillow tonight

did yesterday

• laundry
• Facebook
• back to school staff meeting
• started rearranging my messy classroom
• fixed a broken bookshelf
• talked to my kids on the phone
  
• watched a weird movie with my hubby
• zonked out early

wish I could do

• talk to my mother
• find a cure for diabetes
• lose weight easily
• speak another language fluently
• get people to understand why public school is important and quit to blaming teachers for all the ills of the system
• go on a nice vacation with my family
• keep my house spotlessly clean
  
• get everything done in a day that I mean to get done in a day

shows I watch (thank goodness for DVDs and DVRs)

• Grey's Anatomy
• Army Wives
• TrueBlood
• Nurse Jackie
• The Secret Life of the American Teenager
• Iron Chef America
• Law & Order (any of them)
• CSI (any of them)

favorite foods

• grandma's homemade noodles w/roast beef (which I haven't had in 20+ years)
• chips and salsa
• most any kind of pasta
• eegee's
  
• fresh berries of any kind
• a well-grilled steak and baked potato
• the chicken/pine nut/tomato/gorgonzola salad at Sauce
• the spinach artichoke dip at Houston's

places I'd like to visit/travel

• New York
• Australia
• Ireland
• Hawaii
• San Francisco
• Seattle
• Chicago/greater Chicagoland (to see family)
• San Diego

people I'm tagging

• Nah, do it if you like. No pressure. :)