In Which I'm Glad I Got My Birthday Dinner Out of the Way Yesterday

Today is my birthday. Our family has a tradition of going out to a restaurant of the birthday person's choice to celebrate birthdays. Sometimes, however, schedules get in the way and we need to celebrate the birthday a day or two before or after the actual day. Since Kittygirl has an evening activity EVERY.SINGLE.WEEKDAY this fall (this is all my fault and I'll probably post about it later), we determined that Sunday was the best day to go out.

I was initially disappointed that going out on my actual birthday wasn't an option, but, upon reflection, I realized it wasn't all bad. You see, when you have a child with T1D, every meal is potentially a stressful event. Meals out of the home are potentially even more stressful.

Remember how I posted a few days ago about how every snack that Kittygirl asks for produces an existential dilemma? Meals can be even worse. I can, on occasion, say no to snacks, but the kid has to eat three meals a day. Even if everything has gone wrong and her blood sugar has been out of range for most of the day, I still have to feed Kittygirl dinner. If we're home I might be able to find a low carb option that she'll eat and give me a less stressful evening, but that's not usually an option when we go out.

When you hear a basic outline, T1D doesn't seem so bad. You just have to count your carbs and take the appropriate amount of insulin via your insulin pump or an injection and, unless you calculated the dose wrong, your blood sugar will stay in range, right? Wrong. Sometimes that's the result. Other times the food digested quicker or slower than you anticipated and you ended up with a surprise dip into low blood sugar, or a surprise spike up to high blood sugar, or, just for fun, both. Even when you're at a restaurant that has nutrition information available, that information doesn't tell you all the factors that will go into how your body processes those carbs. And there's very little information available to help you  figure out how your body will deal with any protein or fat in the meal.

Plus there's the question of when to dose for the food. Some people dose right after ordering at restaurants, giving the insulin a headstart. This is often advisable, but, with a picky 8 year old, we can't usually do that at a restaurant because, with a few exceptions, there's no guarantee Kittygirl will eat the food she has ordered. At home we use this strategy frequently because we can always hand her something else if she decides she's not eating whatever we dosed for. At a restaurant that's a lot trickier.

The good news is, Kittygirl didn't eat anything super difficult last night. She didn't like the breading on her chicken, so she ate a little bit of chicken with the breading scraped off (which actually makes it easier to deal with), about half her fries, and a bunch of chips (we had Mexican, one of the few categories the whole family enjoys). All of this meant that I only had to deal with one fairly easy high blood sugar after she went to sleep, as opposed to a ridiculously stubborn high blood sugar that refused to go down despite having insulin shot at it from a cannon.

Other birthday dinners, for me and other family members, have produced much more stressful results. And don't even get me started on evening birthday parties. Cake and ice cream after 5pm produce an unequalled overnight blood sugar monster.

So why do I let this stress into my life? Why don't I stop going out for my birthday and instead cook a meal at home that I know how to dose for? Why don't I say no to the evening birthday parties, or say yes to the parties but no to the cake and ice cream? Why? Because, when Kittygirl was diagnosed, I promised myself that T1D would not control our lives. The thing is, getting rid of birthday dinners out, evening birthday parties, or anything else that adds extra diabetes stress, will not take away T1D. It's always there in the background. It would be there even if our whole family switched to a paleo or keto diet. We'd have less food stress on the average day, but instead we'd likely have food resentment and a kid who hated diabetes because it took away the food she loved.

Our goal is to raise a healthy kid who doesn't look back on her childhood and think that diabetes ruined it. My hope and prayer is that, by the time Kittygirl has reached young adulthood, there will be (if not a true cure) a revolutionary new treatment that takes away all or most of the burden of living with diabetes. However, if that doesn't happen, I want her to go into young adulthood with an attitude that T1D is a part of her life that she has to take care of, but not the boss of her life.

In the meantime, I'm having a somewhat less stressful birthday without anticipating dosing for an unknown dinner. That is, if I ignore the fact that breakfast acted in a way I didn't anticipate and Kittygirl is now starting lunch with high blood sugar.... at least I'm not the one in charge right now. I'll do my best to ignore that and enjoy my birthday lunch with a friend, at which I will not have to count a single carb and for which my amazing pancreas will produce exactly the right amount of insulin. I never realized just how astounding this is until I had to try to take over its job.