There's enough struggle and rollercoaster-riding with one person's diabetes journey, but add another T1D to the mix and it gets all sorts of complicated.
Not all of it is bad, though. In fact being back home with my brother has definitely pushed me to improve my diabetes care in ways I never thought it would. We compete with each other, trivially, in lots of ways when it comes to our diabetes care.
It's been a while since the two of us have compared A1Cs (because neither of us are great at diabetes care and we're both aware of it) but day-to-day BG checking and competing with carbohydrate counts creates a fun dynamic that is unique to the T1D lifestyle. I can think of a few times even when Dillon, before being diagnosed, noted that he felt left out because the two of us were nagging each other and making digs about diabetes.
The competitive side of both myself and my brother reached new levels when we both got the Dexcom CGM, which has a "follow" feature on our phones. While the program was created to help parents manage their children's diabetes care, by giving them low and high alerts (PS if you didn't know this existed, check it out- it's awesome,) it also allows fellow T1Ds to compare data with each other, which can be fun.
The other day Aiden and I were out adventuring together, and my phone went off with a "fall rate alert" from my CGM (see, I'm telling you, this thing is awesome). Aiden, naturally, checks my phone and starts giving me a hard time about not noticing I was dropping, etc etc, and teasing me about my daily trends. This inevitably led to me checking his data and comparing his daily numbers to mine. Yes, kind of nerdy and maybe a little self-deprecating in the humor department, but we've gotta get our kicks somewhere right?
It's these little moments that act as a spark of light in the darker moments of living with diabetes. I've been struggling the last few days with our middle brother's diagnosis, but this moment of shared laughter and light teasing about something neither of us can really do much about- the fact that our pancreases are broken- made me smile.
So through it all, my fellow T1Ds and family members of T1Ds, I think it's good to reflect on the wise words of one of my favorite disney characters, Mary Poppins:
TTFN,
Heather
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