Milestone: One Year Diaversary

Also, during our COVID illness quarantine, we hit a major milestone as a family. It has been a whole year since that fateful day Max was admitted to the hospital, and diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. Sometimes I feel like the last year has been a total blur, and other times I have the most vivid memories filled with extreme emotion (both highs and lows). They call a diabetes diagnosis anniversary a "diaversary", and people in the T1D community have varied feelings about "celebrating" these milestones. There are people who feel like throwing huge parties, because they have overcome and shown massive strength and courage! There are others who feel like it feels very hard to "celebrate", because this disease sucks. Maybe they are still in a stage of grief (pointing to myself here). So a few weeks before, I sat down with Max and asked him what he thought. He felt like we should have a little celebration and said "maybe you can make a cake". I know my own journey with this is going to be different than his, and I want to honor him, because IT IS HIS ACTUAL LIFE for crying out loud. But... then... COVID... (like I said, it lasted an entire month, and as you have gathered from these last few posts, there were a lot of special events during this time period). Another celebration with friends coming to come to the rescue (side note... that expression "an embarrassment of riches" has rolled around in my head a lot after all of this - sometimes it seems absurd and amazing how many incredible people I have in my life). A friend asked me what she could do for me that day, and I felt somewhat sheepish asking her if she could go get me cake supplies from the store. No essential items, only cake supplies LOL. She dropped them off with a hot drink for, plus the cutest little plant and all I needed to make a very special Diaversary Cake. Maddie helped me big time, in fact she probably gets more creative credit here. Fondant is not my area of expertise, but we worked together on our design and delivery to give her brother the funniest cake ever: a "dead pancreas" cake. Max thrives in life partially because he can take dark situations and find the funny. Morbid humor makes diabetes a little less hard. The irony of this one year mark, is Max actually had COVID... a scenario we had worked very hard to avoid. I'm so thankful he only had this milder variant, and despite him being very sick (i.e. KETONES, YIKES!), he recovered and we took care of him. It was our first time seeing how he would do being sick. A learning experience, and one more thing off the list of firsts. 

In conclusion, the chaos of COVID was somewhat of a fitting situation to reflect the chaos of T1D. And yet, we overcame! And we have cakes to prove it! I sure love my boy, and his grit/humor/acceptance/ownership of everything during the last year has blown my socks off.

PS. Maddie told me yesterday she just now realized "diaversary" was a combination of diabetes+anniversary... she thought it actually WAS a reference to the dead pancreas (like die+anniversary). What did I tell you - morbid humor!