One Year Checkup

On Monday, April 5th, we went in for Ellee's one year check up! 

We didn't have the best morning, including a point in which I didn't think my car was going to make it to Dublin.  After calling to let them know we were running behind, we finally got there and had a fairly good visit!

They were fairly happy with her numbers over all.  Her A1C was 8.3 (they like it to be around 7-8).  Her numbers have been higher than what they should be, but they were fairly consistent with very few lows.  We did ask about getting a prescription for an insulin pen and the nurse came in and demonstrated one for us!  I will admit that I was nervous about them after giving Gaven a shot with his.  For some reason it seemed like the needle on his pen was twice as long as the syringes, but after seeing the demo pen, they almost looked smaller!  The girls got a kick out of watching us learn to "bleed the air out" of a new cartridge of insulin!  To do this, you have to set the pen to 2 units and press the "inject" button.  You do this into the air to push any air out of the cartridge before the first use and it shoots a stream of insulin (or in this case of demonstration it was saline), but the girls thought it was just as fun as trying to run through a sprinkler or catch bubbles!

The doctor came in to go over our log book with us.  There really isn't anything worse than having a doctor "yell" at you for doing something you didn't know you weren't suppose to do! She did politely tell us to not adjust the long acting insulin because it takes a few days of consistent dosing to see any results.  Josh and I talked afterwords and he admitted that he did the same thing, he just didn't write it down in the log book! To us, our thinking was rational so why not give it a try?!  Now we know! 

The yearly blood draw afterwords, however, was not so pleasant. =(    We went next door for this and they had a wonderful play area in the waiting room!  Which was nice because the girls were going stir crazy after sitting in the doctors office for 2 hours!  We got called back in a matter of minutes, Dani was ready to follow the nurse, but Ellee was entranced in the toy!  Josh told Dani that she has to stay here and play and without looking up El says "I'm staying here to play too!"  I wish I could have let her, but couldn't.  We did have a great nurse that worked as fast as she could with minimal pain.  Ellee really hasn't had that many blood draws, but she knew that she got that stretchy cord wrapped around her arm and tried to do that herself while the nurse was getting ready!  What followed however wasn't not so fun or cute.  They had a sheet of different bandages for her to choose from.  After blood donations and draws during my pregnancies, I learned that I was okay as long as I didn't watch them insert the needle.  Using this, I tried to get El to concentrate on the sheet and deciding what she wanted. The nurse, being as good as she was, recognized this and inserted the needle.  Unfortunately, it still hurt and she screamed, then cried.  It was over fast, but in the rush and getting El to calm down, I forgot to grab the prescriptions and print out from the doctors when I grabbed my purse and the diabetes bag! 

We went over to Cici's for a late lunch and I got a phone call from a 614 area code and immediately answered it.  Once the nurse said who she was, it immediately dawned on me that I didn't grab the papers!  Oops!!! Thankfully we were still in town and not halfway home!

Over all, we had a very good visit! It's been almost a year since diagnosis and I have to admit that we are all handling this very well!  Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't wish Type 1 on my worst enemy, but you definitely learn how strong you really are when faced with it.