Back to school
In two minds
I was in two minds about going back to school: I wanted to see my friends as I hadn’t seen them for ages but I had several concerns about dealing with diabetes at school when my parents weren’t around.
My first moment in class
When I went into class on that first day I was escorted by one of the office ladies who told my teacher about diabetes. I didn’t think it was that serious. That morning we did an activity where you had to write down your New Year’s resolutions and then if you wanted to you could read them out. As I didn’t care if everyone knew or not, I wrote and said “to do all my injections properly”. Now, I wish I hadn’t because that meant I had to tell everyone in my class I had diabetes. I didn’t care about everyone knowing, not then anyway, but now sometimes I wish that not everyone knew as I don’t want them to think of me as a diabetic first and a child afterwards. Daddy says people see me for my personality first, not diabetes, but I’m not sure.
Injections
I wanted Mummy or Daddy to do all my midday injections with me but it was hard as they both had to work. My mum works at a pre-school quite close to my school therefore it was always her that had to come in for an hour during lunch. I was very happy that she could come in, so you can imagine how upset I was when she told me that she couldn’t do it on Thursdays. For the first couple of Thursdays Daddy come in to do the injections but he couldn’t do it forever as his work was 30 minutes drive away. I said to Mummy that she would keep saying the same for the other days until eventually she wouldn’t come in at all. And I was right. I started doing the injections with the office ladies, but I wanted my Mum. I felt like I had to control diabetes all by myself. I was scared.
Friendships
Luckily for me I have a lovely set of friends and that meant that this disease would not affect our friendship. All my friends volunteered to go to lunch early with me (out of kindness, not just because they wanted to go to lunch early) but I could only pick one, so they took it in turns. I am so glad my friends stayed by my side, it didn’t even occur to me that they might ditch me as a friend and it would have been a very big shock if they had.
Where’s my P.E. (Physical Education) class gone?
I was annoyed EVERY time I did P.E. (which was a lot) as I had to go all the way to the office and do a blood glucose test. If I was alright then I would go to P.E. but if I was lower than 12 I had to eat something before. Unfortunately I didn’t always know where P.E. was, it could have been the hall, the field, the upper school playground, the lower school playground, the millenium garden or even the running track. So I would have to visit every single one of those places and sometimes by the time I had almost visited them all, the class would have finished P.E. and be back in the classroom getting changed!