Day 1

It has been 8 weeks, 1 day and about 4 hours since that ambulance ride down to Boston with my baby hooked up in the back fading into and out of consciousness. Every so often the EMT would adjust her IV and see if he could get her to wake up. I never shed a tear. I just held her hand, put my head down by her side and prayed...like I had never prayed before.

I remember being checked into the ER while my 8 year old daughter was wheeled into a room. I remember being asked the details of what the emergency was...I wasn't sure who the woman was speaking to. "She had the stomach bug & I brought her into her doctor"....my voice trailing off....as the EMT took over to tell her "She has diabetes, her range at admittance was over 700."

I didn't know anything about blood glucose...but I did know you don't get a reading of 700 after a three days of sleeping with some vomiting and sips of gatorade here and there. A flurry of doctors and nurses came in and out and introduced themselves to me, I'm sure many said something meaningful to me...but I was still seeing the doctor in the ER room moments before trying to wake her up to get any kind of response to make sure she had not slid into a diabetic coma.

I heard the words Diabetic Keto-acidosis...I was commended for being a good mother for bringing her into the pediatrician. And I was told we would be here at least a week. I was told she would be like this for a day or two because they had to slowly bring her levels down with the insulin that was going through her IV. But, in a few days, she would start to feel like her normal healthy self....but with type 1 diabetes.

After I texted my parents and my husband and told them that we weren't going anythere, I sat by her side googling DKA. I quickly learned that Type 1 Diabetes is much more serious than I ever thought. I learned it was an autoimmune disease, there was nothing we did or didn't do as parents, there was nothing to stop it. I also learned that this is the rarer and less talked about diabetes. I vaguely remember an ER nurse telling me that Type 1 diabetics, like my daughter cannot live without insulin. She needed it to survive. And that by the end of the week, I would know everything there was to know about how to care for her and manage her diabetes.  I didn't know if I should laugh or cry, this nurse had no idea who she was dealing with. I never shed a tear. I just numbly took it all in and prayed that the universe would give me the strength to lead my daughter to be brave for the next days to come.

That night once we were in our room in the ICE unit, I crawled into bed next to her and just watched her all night....praying with each beep of the IV and with every breath she took.