I'm looking at almond butter when they round the corner and head down the aisle. Two cute college-age girls, laughing and talking. They stop near me and from the way they begin picking items up and reading and discussing the nutrition information, I guess that they are working on some kind of project. My ears perk up when they start talking about gluten.

"This gluten-free stuff has so many carbs," says one.

"It doesn't matter; I don't have to count carbs," says the other.

"Oh my god, can you imagine if you had to eat this gluten-free stuff and had, like diabetes or something and had to count carbs all the time? God, that would suck so bad."

They both laugh. Not cruelly, but just in that way that you do sometimes when you are young and imagining something that would indeed suck so bad, something that you, thankfully, don't currently have to worry about.

I feel like all the air has been sucked out of me.

I've reached that point in life where I don't as often look at college-age people and remember myself at that age. Instead, I imagine my children at that age. I look at those beautiful, carefree girls and think of Olivia. I wonder how things will be for her as she gets older and is that pre-teen, teenager, college student for whom things "suck so bad."

Will she be depressed? Will she be strong? Will she have friends who support her or will her peers give her a hard time? Will she be healthy and do her best to make the "right" choices? Will she rebel and not care for herself as she should?

I suppose that the best guess is "yes, all that and more."

Olivia has had her pump for almost three weeks now and while we have had some issues with it, I am already so mentally and emotionally far away from the shots that I don't think I can ever go back. It's as if we were, out of necessity and hardship, eating food that was half-spoiled. Day in and day out, we forced the stuff down until we got to a place where we hardly noticed that our food was rancid. And then one day...Fresh apples and oranges! Beautiful cuts of meat! Bowls of hot couscous! Brownies! And just like that, the thought, even the thought of eating that other becomes too horrible to bear.

OK, so I have some strong feelings about giving Olivia shots.

(Please. No offense at all intended to anyone who is on shots or giving their child shots. I am just so, so glad not to have to do it today. And I hope that we won't have to do it tomorrow.)

Olivia had her endo appointment last week. I was dreading her A1c. Her numbers haven't really been out of control (except for the post-bedtime high that seems to arrive every night when her Humalog wears off), but I feel like diabetes management has not been top-of-mind recently. Her A1c had gone up, but only slightly from 6.9 to 7.1. I know that we have been the cause of that and I know that we can get it back down.

I was also dreading the appointment because they were going to take blood this time. We have talked about doing it for the last couple appointments, but it got pushed back each time. They would take three vials for the celiac screen, cholesterol, etc. The last couple of weeks have had O at the doctor a lot for general unpleasantness and I didn't want to put her through this, but I did want it out of the way. She cried a lot but held very still and got it done. We were glad it was over and I almost didn't give it another thought once we got out the door.

But the nurse practitioner called yesterday. Four out of five of the antibodies for celiac were positive. Four out of five. Positive. Celiac disease. And the numbers are so out of whack, so high, that there is almost no question, even though Olivia has been exhibiting no symptoms.

Part of me is just mad as hell. Just pissed. It all just seems so ridiculous. Like a cruel joke.

Another part of me is just trying to get on with it. Accept it and start thinking about how to get Olivia to eat more vegetables.

We still have to see a GI doctor in a couple of weeks and I have a lot of research to do. Apparently we are not supposed to change her diet until she has a biopsy, but since the treatment is the same regardless of whether or not the bowel has been damaged and we hope we have caught this early, I intend to question the need for the procedure.

It feels like I have all these pieces scattered all over - O's diabetes, this celiac panel, immune system issues that have come up for Marc and me - I don't know how to put everything together and keep us all healthy. And in the back of my mind, there is this: what about Sawyer?

 

The run-up to Halloween this year had a new intensity. Olivia has developed a different relationship to sweets now that she has had more exposure. Not a day goes by that there isn't some mention of cake, or perhaps some cake and ice cream, or maybe just the ice cream. Treats are still treats; we don't eat them daily, but she would like to. By now, she has been to enough birthday parties to know that she has never met a cupcake she didn't like.

 

Thankfully, in the end her excitement yesterday was more about the costumes and the decorations and the trick-or-treating. She had a great time and paid no attention to what was in her bucket until she got home. Marc and I did some quick editing and she ate a couple of Dum-Dums and saved some for today. She's been clutching one in her hand since about 8am, asking incessantly when it would be time to eat it.

 

And Sawyer? He doesn't care at all about sweets yet, but he was the yummiest peapod ever.