So. Much. Information

These are my notes from yesterday's Peoria trip. The last of our education classes. Ugh. I was so overwhelmed when I left yesterday, because yesterday was all about the ugly side of diabetes. Noah's doing so perfectly right now, because he's in the "Honeymoon stage", which means his pancreas is still working a bit, so his numbers have nearly all been in the 70-90s. Absolutely perfect! So, when I hear about what could happen when his pancreas totally dies and we don't have it helping us, it can get a bit scary! Last session we learned about how to treat low blood sugars. That was a big overwhelming, but we've had a couple in the lower range of the 70s and have been fine. I think we'll know what to do when that happens. Yesterday, however, we learned about how his sugars can get all crazy if he's sick or something and by "sick" I mean, things as simple as scraping his knee can send his sugars into weird ranges. I think the worst situation would be if he gets the flu obviously, so I'm not looking forward to him getting sick EVER now. You'll notice a drawing on the top sheet. This was the nurse's way of trying to show us what happens to his body if he's sick. She wanted to teach us about keotones and ketoacidosis, which involves the word "death" which immediately sends me into a panic! Now, she says that's nearly 100% preventable, but it doesn't stop the crazy thoughts that pop into my head! Basically we learned if he gets sick we have to make sure he's not getting keotones, so we'll have to test for that. Long story short, there will be sugar readings every 2-3 hours and crazy new insulin ratios and equations. Just a lot of monitoring and intervention to make sure we keep his sugars in the normal range. I seriously thought my head was going to pop from all that information. I couldn't process it all. Thankfully I have a brilliant and scientific-minded husband that seems to understand it all. But, gotta be honest, I'm just hoping for a decade-long honeymoon period and a lifetime free of sickness. Is that too much to ask? ;-) She tried to give us a scenario of how we would react if we saw him wake up with nausea and a headache and find out his number is unusually high. I think every decision I made in his "pretend" treatment was wrong, so imagine if I have to do it for real! I'll either be making a lot of phone calls to the center or make Pete stay home from work to help me! Anyway, we learned a lot more - most of it was scary, but we have to learn the scary parts too. The more we're educated the better we'll be at keeping up his care and helping him learn in the process too. Again, just hoping for this "honeymoon stage" to last like the energizer bunny. Going on and on and on and on!