There's a large, or at a least a loud, segment of the diabetes community (mostly consisting of parents of young type 1 diabetics) who are very adamant that diabetes doesn't stop people from doing anything, it just adds extra steps. There are shirts old and proudly worn with the slogan "I can do anything except make insulin".
I think the intent behind this is very good, and I fully bought into it when Kittygirl was first diagnosed. Diabetes should not stop kids from doing well in school, making friends, going to parties and sleepovers, or pursuing their dream career (unless their dream is to join the U.S. Military, since that's a no go at least for now).
However, the longer I spend in the diabetes community and the more I talk with diabetics who have successfully managed their condition for a long time, the more I realized that there are some things diabetics can do but maybe shouldn't, or should at least pursue with extreme caution.
Technically, diabetics can eat any diet they want. However, eating a high carb diet does make it much harder to manage diabetes than eating a low carb diet. Thanks to the dynamic management techniques we've learned combined with a hybrid closed loop system, Kittygirl eats a pretty high carb diet and maintains an A1C her doctor is thrilled with an an above average time in range.
That said, her time in range is only above average because the average is so abysmal. As she gets older and makes more of her own food choices and also has a bigger appetite I'm trying to gently point out times her food choices make her blood sugar go way out of range, which does sometimes stop her from doing things she wants to (like if a high blood sugar leads to a rebound low and she has to sit out of an activity, or she never has to sit out but she keeps getting distracting and annoying Dexcom alarms that she has to deal with).
Ultimately, she will have to manage her disease on her own and make her own choices about what she eats and what activities she does. My hope is that we're able to provide her with a foundation that will allow her to make choices that make her not feel left out while still not having roller coaster blood sugars. This is hard, and I don't doubt that she'll have some roller coaster days that make any roller coaster days she has right now look like small peanuts when she hits the teen years.
No matter what diet they choose, diabetics also can't eat carbs without bolusing insulin. Kittygirl needs to look at her plate before she eats, figure out the carbs, enter them into her pump, and deliver the insulin. Mr. Engineer is now trying to leave that all up to her on scout campouts, with mixed results. She's busy talking with her friends and hungry from a day of constant activity and she has forgotten to bolus until she goes high later more than once.
Finally, sometimes diabetes technology makes certain activities inadvisable. This past weekend Kittygirl and I visited a science museum. During a show about electricity she raised her hand as a volunteer to be shocked with static electricity by one of those big metal balls. However, when the presenter said you should leave anything with batteries at your seat I paused to think. She can take her pump off, but she can't take off her Dexcom sensor and transmitter. Probably nine times out of ten doing an activity like that wouldn't hurt diabetes tech, but it would have been super sucky if she killed her transmitter when we were three hours from home and only one month into its three months of use. I explained the situation and she was put on the docket as the next volunteer.
In the end she got to ride a bike to power some lightbulbs, which was actually cooler than the thing she originally volunteered for so it worked out. However, it's sucky that we even had to think about it.
The fact is, diabetics can do most of what nondiabetics can do, sometimes with no extra thought and often with extra thought and planning. The more I understand diabetes, however, the more I think we're doing parents and newly diagnosed young children a disservice by presenting the idea that they can do literally anything.
The flip side is that without that message parents might be afraid to let their kids do a bunch or normal childhood stuff that they can absolutely do. I think there's probably a happy medium, but I don't have a cute slogan to go with it. If I come up with one, maybe I'll make some t-shirts.
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