O had her 3 month endo appointment yesterday and her A1C was 6.9, down from 7.4 last time. She just recently came off a stretch of about 7 weeks where her blood sugars were excellent - we couldn't have screwed things up if we tried. Things have been a little jumpier here lately; she had a scary low of 47 a couple of days ago. (One good thing did come of that: O told me in no uncertain terms that she was low...."BloodSugarI'mHungryIWantMilk!" and I was able to talk with her more about how she feels when she's low and how important it is to tell someone.) She had eaten at least 30 carbs and gotten what has become a pretty standard one unit of Humalog for lunch, but she had also played hard at playgroup (a first!). She just crashed.

Go back and take a look at how many numbers there are in the above paragraph.

I am not a numbers person. I am sludge-like with even the simplest math. And yet, number-crunching, clock-watching, percentage-calculating, carb-counting has become my life.

What was the blood sugar?
Count the carbs.
Calculate a correction.
Draw up the units.
Watch the clock.
Dilute insulin.
What's the date?
Check the A1c.
Repeat daily, weekly, monthly.

I know that there will be even more as she gets older. Cholesterol and blood pressure. Appointments on the calendar with more specialists. More clock-watching and scheduling. Regimented and time-consuming.

It is easy to get caught up in it, to think that the numbers decide whether a day will be good or bad. But really in the short time that we have been dealing with this, I think that we have all done a pretty good job of living beyond the numbers. O makes it easy...those calculations mean nothing to her. She simply wants to feel good, play hard, and eat melba toast every day. My job is to make that happen. And I'll do everything in my power to do so...even math.