How to Answer “Why Me?”
My son Cole was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes when he was 13 months old. I always knew the question of “Why me?” would come.
Cole is 5 now. For more than four years, he has known nothing but injections, pump site changes, sensor changes, finger pokes, eating when he was not hungry because of a low, or wanting to eat when he couldn’t because he was too high. Cole is our only child, and this has been his life. This has been our life.
We had no idea that something was wrong at first. When he started eating solid foods, he ate more than my 6-year-old nephew did. We thought he was just a great eater. He also drank a ton of water, but we were happy he drank so well. He soaked through diapers, but we assumed that was because of all the water he drank. He really had no other symptoms. He was a big boy—100 percentile for his weight, 75 percentile for his height—and that never really changed.
On his first birthday he was sick. It seemed like a mild cold. Nothing crazy. He got better, and a few weeks later he got sick again. He was in daycare, so we figured he’d been exposed to a cold. The day he was diagnosed he refused to eat. This was a big clue something wasn’t right, as he never refused food. Then his breathing got worse. The doctor had me bring him to her. She worked a long time trying to figure out what was wrong and stated she could smell ketones on his breath. She had the nurse check his blood sugar. The reading was 482. An ambulance was called to take Cole to the nearby children’s hospital.
His doctor never said, “diabetes” to me. You’d think with a blood sugar of 482, I would have realized, but I didn’t. The paramedic asked me if I knew what was going on. I stated that I didn’t. He said he couldn’t officially diagnose Cole because he wasn’t a doctor, but when I got to the ER they would tell me that my son had type 1 diabetes. I was so ignorant to what that all meant. My sergeant at work had type 1. I only knew he had to check his blood glucose and give himself shots before eating. If it hadn’t been for my son’s diagnoses, I feel I’d still have no idea what type 1 diabetes (T1D) really is. I know the world is full of people who are just as clueless as I was. For that reason, we try to educate as many people as we can.
Before Cole was on the pump, people always asked why we were giving him injections. People are still curious when they see us check his finger, or when they see his pump or continuous glucose monitor (CGM). We don’t hide it. We take care of his needs wherever we might be. For the most part people are genuinely curious and eager to learn. So we like to educate. Cole always wants to show off his Dexcom to people and show his pump sites too. To me it seemed that he had just accepted diabetes as part of his life. He never asked about it.
Then the day came. We had been out to lunch, and I was pulling into our driveway. Cole unbuckled himself from his car seat and proceeded to open the car door. He paused, closed the door and sat back down. I turned around to look at him, and he stared at me a moment and said, “Why did God pick me to have diabetes? I see lots of other kids and they don’t have diabetes, so why me?” It was a question I asked myself often. Why him? I thought for a minute and told him that God must have known how strong and brave he was and that he could handle it. That God must have known he would be there to help other kids with diabetes be strong and brave just like him. Cole looked at me and said, “Oh, okay.” He jumped out of the car, and started to play. I, on the other hand, sat in the car for a second trying to stop the tears.
I made a video to help educate people about type 1 and show them what our first year with T1D was like. The next year I did the same. For the past two years, Cole and I have made silly diabetes parodies. Last year we started to post more frequently to our Funboy Coco.” We post videos about life with diabetes and tips and tricks we have learned over the years.
These are our type 1 Tuesday videos. We also post daily vlogs that of course include life with type 1. When Cole was first diagnosed, while going through the process of getting a diabetic alert dog, we started a Facebook page: “Operation Dad-Life with Type 1 Diabetes.” Now it’s just a page where we post about life with diabetes and Bella, Cole’s diabetic alert dog.
Cole was the one to ask about doing a YouTube channel, and I figured why not. We have learned so much from the online community over the years, from Facebook support groups, our local JDRF friends and through sites like Beyond Type 1. We hope that we can continue to help those who are new to T1D or know nothing about it be strong, brave and better educated when the question of “Why me?” comes up.
Find other ways to get involved with Beyond Type 1.
