When I was first diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes it was a hard change, it was all new. As a 9 year old I wasn’t that scared, maybe a little frustrated but I don’t ever recall being scared. However, both of my parents were scared for me.Being forced to adapt to a new lifestyle is hard for anyone. Especially when the thing on the line is life or death. Or the ability to see, hear, and feel. Diabetes can also result with complications with the kidneys.

My parents had to hear all of these complications within a short period of time and were then told what they needed to do to prevent any of these things from happening. (Lantus aka long lasting insulin throughout the night, carbohydrates aka we need to learn how to read a nutrition label, testing your blood sugar level aka pricking your child’s finger every day at least 5 times a day).

With this crazy lifestyle suddenly becoming ours everyday it caused for certain things that I used to do to come to a stop.

The reason why I call it a stoplight is because in my mind now, it was a brief pause to let things progress. To let this idea of a new lifestyle continue for a little bit while we sat back and waited patiently to understand it more.

But, I did have to stop doing things that I previously did all the time.

One of the things that stopped was being over my grandma’s house almost everyday of the week. This was the biggest thing that changed because I was always over. I was always sleeping over and there. So to not be able to sleep over there was weird, but my parents weren’t comfortable to leave me off by myself; both my grandparents took great care of me, but diabetes is such a hard thing to understand and my parents just weren’t ready to burden someone else with this huge responsibility I suppose. I don’t know that for a fact though.

So spending nights and weekends at my grandparents house came to a stop. Similarly to when a car is at a red light, sometimes the stop itself feels as if it is longer than previous red lights. This was one of the stop lights that it felt as though was longer and everyone else was going and I was just sitting and waiting.

For a period of time sleepovers at friends houses were put at a stop light because of the constant night time blood sugar check. I remember when my friend had a sleepover birthday party and I had to leave that same night to go home. I was upset and felt left out because I couldn’t stay. It wasn’t fair.

However stoplights have yellow which means to slow down. So when all of what I felt like red lights were happening I think that they were actually yellow. That my parents needs to slow down and figure out my situation more before anything else began to go green.