Talcum Powder Thighs and Type 1 Diabetes

I feel I should put a disclaimer on this post, before anyone reads it.

Or a hashtag – to prove I am down with the kids.

#anotherbloodydepressingdiabetespost

(I’ll translate for those like me who have to read hashtags over and over until they work out the real words – another bloody depressing diabetes post.)

Anyone still here?

My mum will see this through to the end.

So, in our little diabetic household we have like the rest of the nation been sweating our asses off whilst simultaneously losing a fight against mosquitos in the last three days.  I would like to say I have embraced the heatwave that has swept the UK, but instead I have spent much of the time wondering why everyone else looks good in a bikini on Instagram as I have been repeatedly applying talcum powder everywhere that my skin meets.

My thighs look like they have dandruff.

And we haven’t slept.

Mainly because we only have one fan in a family of four, and most of the evening is spent waiting until the person with the fan nods off, then sneaking into their room and grabbing the fan and legging it back to your own room.  Slept is then happily reached until the person who had the fan last, starts to dream that they are being held hostage by Satan himself and wails loudly as they realise the beautiful fan has been flinched.

And we haven’t slept because the Type 1 gremlin that lives in my daughters blood stream has similar feelings about the heat in the UK that I do.

Clearly not a bikini loving, Instagram sharing type of gremlin.

More a sweaty assed, talcum powder wearing type of chronic condition.

But it is hard.

It is hard to watch as a parent who works bloody hard to try to maintain stable sugars in their child when Type 1 breaks the rules again and suddenly sends her blood sugar screaming through the roof, or plunging through the floor.

It is hard to be that nagging mum when all she wants to do is eat Ice Cream and run around in the sprinkler with her friends and my voice is like a drum in her head, “what are your sugars? Have you tested ketones? Can you apply another TBR?”

It is hard to get up every hour in the night to pretend to be a pancreas when sometimes you have feck all idea of what you are doing.

It is hard when you breathe a sigh of relief when she goes to school and you can nap for 5 minutes and have a break from the gremlin for a few hours, but you know that will never be her.

It is constant, it is unforgiving, it is always there.

It is harder when you have been told that your daughter’s kidneys have already started to feel the burden of her diabetes, despite her blood sugar control being perceived as ‘good’; and all you need to do to keep those beautiful kidneys stable is make her take a pill a day and keep her blood sugars low.  Perhaps if I had managed that in the first place she wouldn’t need to take the bloody daily pill.

Yesterday, the gremlin must have been riding a rollercoaster in her body for us to achieve blood sugars like this…

I’m not alone – I know from reading in support groups at 2am that many diabetics and their parents are facing long, lonely battles with the sugar demon in the night.  Exacerbated by the burning sun.

I said it was going to be a miserable post. I’m tired, grumpy, fed up of being a demon parent to a little girl who shouldn’t have to deal with this shite.

And I’m hot, and my lack of sleep means all I want to do is drink tea and eat biscuits (because that is totally a thing).

The excess biscuits means the sweaty thigh issue will only grow more relentless and I am running out of talc and test strips.

A trip into the blistering world may be needed-please excuse my PJ appearance.

I am a mum, to an amazing Type 1 warrior, but today it is hard and god damn, my appearance will reflect that.

 

 

If I managed to keep you to the end of the post – and you feel slightly moved to help invest find a cure, you may want to sponsor me as I embark on the Yorkshire 3 Peaks challenge next week – 23 miles up and down hills, if it doesn’t cool down then expect to see talcum powder shortages in Yorkshire.  The link is here:

https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/thayorkshire3peaks

Thank you.