I have so many things I need to be doing right now, but there is nothing more important (there is, but this is how procrastinators justify their procrastinating) than to share my morning with you all, the inspiration behind victory.
I brought a piece of FUD to a second grader today, and I’m feeling wonderful. There’s nothing diabetes about this… or at least nothing more than the fact that his one simple answer to my very simple question really summed up how diabetes once felt to me. It was the saddest answer ever coming from a sweet but somber second grader on a Friday morning… I asked, well, two questions. The first was how are you today? His answer was simply sick. Okay, so I guess there were more than two questions… because I don’t know how else I got all this information, but when prodded a little, he explained that he was sick with allergies and needed to drink medicine to feel better and sometimes use a special medicine to breathe in. We know these medicines well. These are probably something like Benadryl or Claritin and an inhaler. So I gave him the word, inhaler. Then the second question… I asked *what are you doing this weekend? Anything you’re looking forward to?”
This was the answer that made things start to whir in my brain. When asked how he was, his answer was sick. When asked if he had anything to look forward to, his answer was feeling less sick.
He’s a second grader. That’s a serious burden, and I know that burden well. It’s a life lived between the present amount of sick and the potential future amount of sick. And that sucks.
So I FUD-ed him. We were reading a book about matter, and although I was told he was a weak reader, I didn’t find it to be true at all. He just needed to be engaged. We had a wonderful talk and a wonderful read. We took what we were looking at and made it funny and made it real. We talked about liquids and solids as blood and bones, and that is when he asked so the inhaler (unsure if he had the word right) is kind of a gas… and it goes into my lungs? And then into my body? And that was it. Right there. He might forget it all by the time he gets home, but for just that one second, he was thinking. Then, of course, he started asking me very high level questions about the function of blood and other stuff I had to make up answers to, but for just that second…
It was a really nice morning, and it made me remember what it felt like to be in the dark and what a difference knowledge has made. What a difference FUD has made.
Anyway. Nap time.