Steve

When the three of us arrived at this lavish resort there was much excitement and gaiety. It was sunny and warm and the hotel and landscaped grounds were elegant and stunning. We had travelled before as a family to other various interesting places — Paris, Rome, Belgium, Germany — but those trips

Our first month living with diabetes ended with our daughter, Lia, and Franca and I retreating for a weekend to a posh golf resort in the central part of our state. We were there to attend a statewide family outreach event sponsored by the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation and we

There were many ways our family and friends and other people we knew showed their concern for Lia and our family in the days following her diagnosis. The best one was the visit by John, Jenny and Jessie, who detoured their travel plans to see Lia in the hospital on

Two and a half weeks after Lia’s diagnosis she returned to school. The holiday break was a godsend, giving us time to get our arms around her diabetes, so by the time classes started back up we all had become lay experts in the field, at least in terms

I think about this, about her, a great deal of the time, especially when she is not near me. I wonder what she thinks of it. What she fears. What she knows about her diabetes. She is brilliant and surprises me every day with just how much she’s listened

I mentioned hope. In the days following Lia’s diagnosis, one of the first things we noticed in our efforts to understand diabetes was the plethora of information out there. Looking back through my internet search history for one day last week out of 289 different web pages I had

Here’s how it begins, our waking hours: Hugs, check blood sugar, plan meal, determine portions, count carbs, calculate insulin need, select site for injection, give shot, cry, comfort, then eat, fret, devour information on diabetes, fret more as we regurgitate the data we learned to one another, promise to

And so here we are home again. Living some semblance of living amidst the glucose readings, needles and counted carbs. You start to think: How in the hell did this happen? To her. To us. To me. Why? Was it something I caused? Some plague I’d escorted unsuspectingly into

Wednesday morning, December 23rd. Starts out, almost, like any other. I say almost because the kids are out of school; we slept later than usual; and our littlest one, Lia, is seemingly slow to recover from both a cold and a busy weekend. She comes downstairs as my wife and