Hang Ten

Manny (of Tudiabetes...like I need to tell you who he is) sent out an email asking parents to let their kids speak out about having diabetes by printing a word on their hand that describes how they feel about having it.

After Brendon came home from school today, I asked him if he wanted to participate and he said yes!

He offered up the word: annoying.

Yes diabetes can be quite annoying, I thought to myself.

But, Brendon's reasoning came from a different place.

As much as it is wonderful for kids at school to be curious about his diabetes and lobbing questions at him about what it's like to have it as well as about his pump, he gets annoyed with having to answer them all the time.

I agreed that it's annoying to have to answer the same kinds of questions all the time like that, and I suggested a plan to help with it. He wanted to ask his school nurse about it, so we'll see how it goes. I'll post about it if it ever comes about.

Later on, I really wanted to know...what does it FEEL like for him. I needed profundity from him because diabetes is a deep, emotional thing and being that I often want to crawl into his head and experience how HE'S doing with it emotionally, I encouraged him to share another word with me.

He shrugged his shoulders, "I don't know. Nothing."

"You don't feel much about having it?"

"No. I just have it. I don't know."

And he continued flipping through a book he was reading.

He's had diabetes for the majority of his brief seven years of life. I've written about this before: Diabetes just is for him.

He's continuing to ride the wave, dude.

Life for him isn't about agonizing over having diabetes.

Life for him is all about wearing his Mets baseball cap and his Jets jersey all at the same time to school so that he, in his words, can break the power of the Red Sox and the Patriots.