Today is the day our website finally launches and I couldn't be more excited! I've been working on our website and our support network "Maddy's Network" since May (almost 6 months ago) when we found out Madison had Type 1 Diabetes at the age of 12 months old.
She is now 18 months old and is doing amazingly well. She's a tough kid for sure. I'm amazed by her strength everyday but still can't help but wish it were me and not her.
The truth is I was angry in the beginning, I understood completely how people that had gone through horrible experiences lost their faith and I definitely lost mine. Those first few weeks I was full of hate, anger and pain but I learned quickly that I had to let that go if my daughter was ever going to have a chance at a happy life. Those feelings aside, my first instinct was to find her a cure, I mean how hard could it be?
To make a long story short (and I will go into greater detail of our journey in segments on this blog) I am surprised by how much we have grown as a family in 6 short months. We are different people today than we were then. The amount of knowledge I've gained has been incredibly valuable to my daughter's health and hopefully I can share that information and my resources here with you to help you find your way.
Some days it seemed like we would never feel normal or laugh again, there was not much light at the end this tunnel and my husband and I were lost. We were still just learning to be parents to our first child we couldn't fathom having to give her injections and blood glucose tests. We often joked before her diagnosis that we were surprised we had managed to keep her alive as well as bathed, fed and well dressed as long as we did, we thought she was so fragile. This Diabetes thing was a real life or death situation, it was up to us to learn how to manage this disease based on a 1 hour hospital crash course and a few books and still manage our everyday struggles of life and parenting.
Knowing that her blood sugar could drop in the middle of the night while I was sleeping and she could go into a coma or die terrified me, I didn't sleep the first 3 months. I tested her every two hours, it was so unpredictable and unmanageable at first. Then one day it just got easier.
I started focusing on why this happened to us and what we were supposed to learn from it. I knew that there had to be other Mom's like me going through this searching for answers and alternatives and I knew that there were other Moms like I was in the beginning, completely lost with nowhere to turn. I networked with everyone I could find online I traveled to multiple Naturopaths, Nutritionists and Endocrinologists and I found that there was an alternative to insulin injections. More on this later.
My point is that it is always terrifying to feel out of control when it comes to your child's life and health but there are ways you can regain control. Most importantly you have to stay positive, remember this is a lesson, we are here to help each other through, you are not alone in this fight and it is a fight we will one day win. Until then we'll continue to search for the answers, the cause and the cure and try to educate the people who think we just fed our kids too much cake.
