Tuesday, April 13, 2010

A1C going down...

Good news! We went to the Diabetes Clinic yesterday and Alyssa's A1C went from 8.3% to 7.8%! Just goes to show you the pump is working much better than insulin shots.

For those who don't know, here's a definition what A1C is:
a test that measures a person's average blood glucose level over the past 2 to 3 months. Hemoglobin (HEE-mo-glo-bin) is the part of a red blood cell that carries oxygen to the cells and sometimes joins with the glucose in the bloodstream. ...

Her goal for this past visit was to get below 8% (which we did!) and they want to keep her as close to 7% as possible so we keep her healthy long term.

When she was diagnosed she was 13.8%.

A child without diabetes runs around 4.6% on average.

Small victories.

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

The kids on Easter

Alyssa with her Easter basket
Christian Easter 2010

Here are pictures of the kids on Easter! I have more when they were dying eggs with me and daddy, so I'll post those later. :)

Easter was wonderful. We dyed eggs on Saturday (Christian thought we were "killing the eggs"), on Sunday morning the kids found their Easter baskets. Alyssa got a new Wii game called "World of Zoo" (she's so into video games, any sort of game really!), a chocolate Easter bunny and some sugarfree gum. Christian got a new Diego toy (he plays make believe with things a lot more than Alyssa does), a chocolate Easter bunny and sugarfree gum. The Easter bunny left them candy in their eggs, except for Alyssa, she got money. The darn Easter bunny though, hid 10 eggs for each of the kids and we could only find 19! That Easter bunny... forgets where he hides his own eggs... sheesh...

Afterwards we headed to church for a wonderful service with Papa Dave and Nana. Papa Roger was unfortunately out of town on business. Afterwards we headed to Nana's house and had a wonderful, big breakfast, watched "The 10 Commandments" and then later in the day we took the kids with Papa Dave to see "How to Train Your Dragon" in 3D. Very good movie!!!

It was a wonderful Easter, and a wonderful celebration of the selfless love of our Lord, sending His son to bridge the gap between Himself and us. Thank God for that.

Friday, April 2, 2010

Sometimes it's so surprising

We went to Alyssa's 6 year physical at her regular pediatrician today. She's growing like a weed, 51 lbs, 46 1/8" - right on track with where she should be. She's amazing, she's beautiful. She had glucose in her urine which signaled high blood sugar - sure enough, 417 when we pricked her finger. She's been having major highs every day before lunch. Time to call the endocrinologist and make some adjustments.

As we were sitting in the pediatician talking with him - the office where she has gone for her whole life and we've been so many times - grief kind of overtook me and I got emotional. Sometimes I feel like we're living in some kind of nightmare and we're going to wake up sooner or later and Alyssa will have normal blood sugars, she won't have Diabetes anymore and everything will be "normal" again.

Dr. Davies (ped) told us that we need to be more worried about many low blood sugars since they bring seizures, comas and could even bring death; but the high blood sugars are dangerous for the long term affects for Alyssa.

It's like being on a seesaw and having to keep it perfectly level at all the time. But you can't, you can't do it.

It's exhausting and sometimes I look back and go, Oh my gosh... this is my life. This is my daughter's life. This is our reality. And it hurts.