I’m working though my emails this morning and there was one from Kohl’s. It’s their “best Black Friday deals early” email. Um, WHAT? We barely have one foot in the door of November. My God, I haven’t even begun to think about Thanksgiving.

There were also several “store” emails taunting with coupons to save money by spending money, daily recipes I will never cook, endless Pinterest pins I have to see, and a new bill from waste industries. Which I find ironic seeing as this week they didn’t even have to leave the comfort of their truck because Opac forgot to take the trash cans out. Oh, and another email with 5 Trending Ideas for the Living Room and Where to Hide the Litter Box in the subject line. This sounds like one I can’t afford to miss. Hopefully the trend in Living Rooms is not where we hide the litter box.

Speaking of litter boxes, I was watching American Horror Story last night, alone, when I suddenly became aware of some shuffling noises coming from my kitchen. Both kids were already in bed. Then the dog stood up and stared into the kitchen. A moment later, Oliver came barreling into the living room chasing a small gray thing that appeared to be fast-limping in circles until it found the entertainment center and scuttled under it.

Long story short, we live in the country and the nights are growing colder. This is the second night this week that Oliver has had a live toy to play with. The first night, he and his furry buddy woke Veruca – and then me – at 4 o’clock in the morning. She and I followed them in horrified amusement until the mouse disappeared into one of our guest rooms in the rec room. I figured it’d take a miracle for them to end up back in Veruca’s room, so we went back to bed. By morning, Oliver was playing with the body just inside the front door.

Last night Todd came home from working late and found me sitting on top of the back of the couch, simultaneously watching AHS and the cat, and said – what are you doing? I stood up and walked across the couch to greet him, and pointed at the cat. Fifteen minutes later Oliver chased this thing down the stairs, I opened the front door, and Todd swooshed it outside with a dustpan. It is an unnerving and slightly hilarious thing to watch your cat capture a mouse in his mouth and then let it go several times, and not know which way the mouse is going to run or if it’s going to end up in your bed before morning.

So, back to that first night… where I was up at midnight and 3 a.m. for blood sugar checks. Veruca went to bed high (high blood sugar, not drug-induced high) and after an insulin pump site change, at 9:30. She continued to run high all night – 452 and 343 respectively – probably due to the pizza and birthday cake we’d had earlier for Opac’s birthday celebration.

My alarm was set for 3 and I got up to find her stable again at 162. Less than an hour later I was awakened to shuffling noises and then a soft knocking at my door – Veruca standing wide-eyed in the hallway – and for a brief moment I panicked, thinking she might’ve gone very low after correcting those high numbers.

November is Diabetes Awareness Month, and I commit myself every year to advocacy and awareness for Type 1 diabetes – the chronic illness my daughter has lived with for 9 and half years.

The JDRF has a new “thing” on their site where one can calculate their diabetes footprint. My daughter was diagnosed in June of 2007 at the age of 2. She began with a terrible, old-school regimen of insulin shots that turned her blood sugars into a ride so wild they made the Kingda Ka look like It’s A Small World.

Her calculated diabetes footprint looks like this:

3,425 Days living with T1 Diabetes

1,952 Hours of sleep lost (this is waaaaay off base)

20,550 Finger Pricks (also way off base)

964 Insulin Pump site changes (off base)

There were far too many nights I had maybe 3 hours of sleep total, after constant monitoring and vigilance. Night time is the scariest time for T1s – when many can suffer low blood sugars that can go unchecked if they don’t wake up to test. Low blood sugars, if left untreated, can lead to unconsciousness, and even death.

We used to test her every two hours. Every. Two. Hours. Every day. That’s a minimum of 12 finger sticks per day. Based on that, and given that we’ve backed off of so frequent checking – her total number of finger pricks to date is more like 30,000.

She’s had T1 for 9 years and 5 months. She’s worn an insulin pump for just over 8 years. The site gets changed every two days. Except when there’s a “bad” site, or we have two consecutive blood sugars over 240. Then it gets changed again. There were many, many times it was changed nearly every day, and on a rare occasion, more than once in a day. Therefore, I’d recalculate the above number to more like 1500.

Nine years in, and we know when it’s a site issue, or just some other anomaly. We know that highs happen, and that lows happen, and that that’s just how diabetes rolls.

I know that to outsiders we make it look easy. We don’t piss and whine about how horrible Type 1 diabetes is. After 9 years, it is our way of life… and it is all my daughter knows. But there is so much more to this disease. So much more, and it’s scary and unfair and there are children dying from it. Just one child dying from undiagnosed diabetes should be too many, and last year there were at least 5 that I can count.

 **Disclaimer: I don’t use the upgraded service; therefore, you will see ads at the bottom of my posts (ads I don’t see because I’m not you). As it has come to my attention that certain ads may not align with my world views – I am compelled to add the following statement until further notice.

I ABSOLUTELY DO NOT SUPPORT DONALD TRUMP. NOT YESTERDAY, NOT TODAY, NOT – EVER.