Back-to-School Night With Type 1 Diabetes

My son with type 1 diabetes starts kindergarten the day after tomorrow. He’s excited, and we’re excited. We anticipate a safe environment in which he’ll learn, grow, and be healthy. We’ve met and planned with the school, but just hours ago, on the walk home from back-to-school night, tiny cyclones of fear, worry, and jealously snaked inside me.

Back-to-school night with type 1 diabetes means a pile of glucose tabs, glucagon kits, test strips, extra insets, a ketone serum meter, airheads for the really low lows, spreadsheets of instructions, snacks with carbs, snacks without carbs, lancets, a back-up meter, and extra adhesive have been queued in your dinning room for a week.

Back-to-school night with type 1 diabetes means you walk your son to all the bathrooms closest to his classroom. You point out the water fountains along the way.Back-to-school night with type 1 diabetes is taking four times as long to drop off materials as other families because you have so many more items. In fact, when you’re dropping off supplies and signing form after form in the nurse’s office, the courteous mother behind you tells the staff she’ll be back tomorrow, meaning when they’re less busy. It’s realizing, in that moment, despite your two big bags of supplies, that you forgot the snacks with carbs, so you’ll be back tomorrow as well.

Back-to-school night with type 1 diabetes is walking the route between the nurse’s office and his classroom several times, just to make sure he doesn’t get lost. You realize it’s a trip he’ll make several times a day, and he’ll know it like the back of his hand in a week.

Back-to-school night with type 1 diabetes is rushing from work to the pharmacy so you can get the glucagon kits for school, and as you walk past the cashier to the pharmacy counter, you see a mother wave a purple glittery pencil box before she pays for it. You overhear her say to the cashier, “It’s back-to-school night tonight, and this is the last thing we need. We almost forgot about it.” A needle of jealousy pierces you, and you wish back-to-school night was just about pencil boxes and markers, a blithe almost forgetting of things. But then you remember to be kind because everyone is fighting great invisible battles. Surely living with type 1 has taught you that.

Back-to-school night with type 1 diabetes means looking at all the other boys and girls your son will most likely go to school with for the next 13 years and hoping they will be compassionate and understanding. But you’ve been a kid on a playground and in a lunchroom. You know kids aren’t empathetic and kind all the time. Back-to-school night with type 1 diabetes is hoping your non-T1D kid doesn’t feel minimalized as she waits for you to finish something diabetes related for the fourth or fifth time that day. She’d like to see her classroom too and asks if there’s still time to visit her teacher.