Ad hoc

Of course, that is not entirely true … Using an insulin pump to treat
type 1 diabetes is not like “not having diabetes anymore”.

But then, why use the sentence as the headline of the first post on this blog?

Because, when our daughter had been using this device – the insulin pump – for about a year out of the seven years she had been having diabetes at that time, one of her best friends said so, when they were playing together one afternoon:

“It’s almost, as if Emilie doesn’t have diabetes anymore …”.

In all their spontaneity, those words made my wife and I reflect ourselves. The pump had not come easily – we had been through a bit of a fight with our hospital to get it and we were very determined to make our ‘new life’ work out well.

However, if we are asked to stop ourselves and put words on this new life – how will we judge ‘life on a pump’, then?

First, we will not put it as directly as our daughter’s friend did. We know all too well, that Emilie still has diabetes, and that she will have to live with it – hopefully not the rest of her life, but for years to come. We know, that it will demand daily discipline from first of all herself to control her blood glucose so well, that her health will not be harmed over the years.

The insulin pump is not a cure!

Nevertheless, then – what made Emilies schoolmate say as she did?

Well – now she has a friend who eats and drinks as everybody else in the class. Who does not need special catering at birthday parties and who does not need to eat snacks at fixed times before and after lunch to avoid hypoglycaemia. And who is free to eat – almost – whatever she likes at lunch. Or, maybe, almost nothing at all if she is not hungry!

The Emilie that she is playing with now, can stay for dinner without having to pull down her pants to take a shot of insulin in the thigh before eating. Moreover, her thighs and hips are not filled with red marks as large as mosquito bites.

Now, Emilie is in charge of what she wants to eat. Eating, again, has become a matter of pleasure and feeling hungry. Before the pump, food was very much to be considered as a drug – like pills to be taken in fixed amounts in order not to feel ill.

That difference is not a mere detail to a child. It makes the difference between being considered as ‘a girl with diabetes’ or a girl like everybody else – just wearing an extra ‘mobile phone’ – the insulin pump.

You could call it quality of life. We would add that Emilie and we at the same time have become able to control her diabetes in a better way. And thereby dramatically reduce her risk to develop complications to the disease.

Today (updated october 2006), Emilie is 13 years old. She has been using the insulin pump for four and a half years now, and on this blog I, her father, will tell the story of a family living with diabetes. What it does to the child, the family, and our life.

I have got quite a bit to catch up with, but after having told our story up to now, I intend to keep on posting about type 1 diabetes, insulin pump therapy and other related topics.

Read the next post in this series.