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Diabetes and Family |
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One of the books that I love is called The Diabetic Bible and it is absolutely inspiring. It explains a lot about diabetes and how they believe it actually forms and what they believe what causes it. They also give some great recipes in there. What makes it fun is that you get to spend time with your children, or a child, and you actually have them help. They can go retrieve the ingredients for you and it’s a great family thing. Helping out with the cooking is just like being on a baseball team, just being part of a team, makes everyone feel good by the end of the night. -Father I really wonder what it’s like for children that have diabetes in single parent families. Or they’re in a situation where their life is already really hard to begin with and then they have this on top of it. It just seems like it would be extremely difficult. So I guess we’re lucky because we’re a nuclear family and we have a lot of relatives nearby that can help. -Father If you do have relatives and family members that are nearby, have a check list or some kind of info-sheet to orient other members of your family that aren’t doing all the direct care, but still need to understand the generalities of what’s happening. There’s a lot of science to it that big families probably have to learn to live through, but you can kind of boil that down. Maybe take the list that the school nurse gets and share it with aunts, uncles, grandparents and siblings. -Father We are a family that takes family vacations together and the ten of us go away. We now range in age from five to seventy-three. So we have had to change our way of traveling to a more upscale way. We choose a place and it has to be near a hospital. It has to be a single air flight away because we don’t want Billy to spend a whole day in an airport and on a plane. We want to make sure that he has as little down time as possible. And there has to be a place that offers a menu. We don’t want to cook. We’ve tried cooking. The little ones, my other grandchildren, won’t eat what Billy eats. They want to eat their things and that puts a big stress on the whole family if we’re not eating the same food. So we have to go to a place that has some kind of a restaurant where they offer wholesome foods that Billy can order, plus things that the little kids can order. -GrandmotherWhen children grow up, they grow away from you. I would say that even though Karen and I are mother and daughter and saw each other all the time, we weren’t really intimate. You know, she didn’t confide her problems and day to day things in me. We were more like adult friends with a respectful distance. When Karen’s son, Billy [my grandson], was diagnosed with diabetes, it broke that down because when Karen couldn’t take it anymore, she would show up at my house and just start talking. And I would write it down on my computer so that I wouldn’t interrupt her, so that I wouldn’t offer advice--so I could just be a sounding board. For about three years, I was her release so she didn’t have to confide her worries and irrational fears, and feelings of hysteria and everything in her husband, or children, or therapist. So that brought us closer together. And it also brought me and Billy’s sister, Abby, closer together because while Karen was so focused upon Billy, it became apparent that Abby had to take second best--a back seat. So I started taking her out for lunch and doing all the shopping with her for clothes and stuff like that, driving her around, and baking with her. I was one of a number of people who reached out to the other child so that she wouldn’t feel neglected and ignored. -Grandmother It increased my admiration for my daughter Karen and her husband John—especially my love for John because I saw how concerned and devoted a father he was. He’s always coached Billy’s soccer team. He just went to every appointment and would confer with Karen by phone several times a day. I just had an enormous respect for the conscious way in which they approached this and how they thought about it and how they came out with the idea they would be a “diabetes family” rather than setting Billy apart. It gives you this feeling of pride to know that you must have done a good job that your kid is such a caring parent and that she choose such a wonderful husband and that Abby would be so grown-up and caring about her brother. I see too that it’s brought them all closer. -Grandmother We’ve met a lot of families that have been divorced because of diabetes. You know, it puts such an extra stress upon the family, upon the husband and wife relationship that they can’t handle it. They were probably there already, but we’ve seen a lot of families where divorce happens right after diagnosis. That’s horrible, really, because that’s exactly when your kid needs you and I think it’s really only through the team approach where fathers become an intricate part of giving your child the best care. -Father With diabetes management, taking care of a child with diabetes is not something that one parent can do by themselves. There’s a tendency for fathers, especially if they’re the working father and the mom is either not working or working part time, to leave the diabetes care to the mother. That basically does not work. It’s too much for one person to handle both either physically or emotionally. It’s incredibly important that the father be as much of an equal team member as possible in diabetes care. Diabetes is not a disease that is easy to deal with. There’s constant recalculation and decision-making. It’s not an exact science at all. So to the extent that you can talk to your spouse about that, it really makes the care much easier. You might have a certain reaction of what to do in a given situation and your spouse may have a different reaction, which is completely valid. Because giving insulin is such an important thing to do and can have such extreme consequences, the whole team aspect of it is extremely important. -Father I think your first impulse is to try to fix things and to somehow feel that it’s your responsibility to make things better, and I think that’s really the wrong way to go because you don’t know enough and because the kid’s already getting enough advice. I came to the conclusion that there are only two things you can do. One is to turn up the love. And if your daughter is not doing well and she’s losing her temper and if they’re fighting or whatever, just to be very, very accepting, approving and forgiving because the stress is terrible. And the other thing is to be available. My daughter Karen called one morning and said, “I can’t take it.” And I got dressed and went over and she went in the shower and screamed and cried. I said to her that anytime she needs me, I’ll cancel a date with a friend or anything that I can switch because my kid doesn’t ask for help unless she is really in need. I am committed to being there and I think that’s all you can do. Help and love. -Grandmother
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Copyright © 2009, Children's
Hospital Boston Department of Psychiatry. All Rights Reserved. The information on this website should not be taken as medical advice, which can only be given to you by your personal health care professional. Updated: June 8, 2009 |
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