The Temptation of a Good Excuse

And why you shouldn’t take it

The Skip card in the UNO! card game, source: Wikipedia Commons

There’s a lot of talk about the difficulty of saying “no.” It comes from the modern norm of hyperextension, multitasking, and constant doing. What’s one more item on the to-do list? What’s one more volunteer hat at your kid’s school? What’s one more activity to fill the afternoon?

While I have been victim to the fallout of one too many “yeses” in years past, I now find that “yes” much harder to come by. Sometimes, I may give you one, but it will ring unconvincing, to my own ears and most definitely to yours. The way it hangs in the air, it’s as though a big squiggly punctuation mark lingers. Other times, it will come out hearty and full if you catch me with a large cup of caffeine in hand or following a night of less broken sleep. And then, as the stimulant’s effect wanes and my eyelids sit heavier atop my eyes, it will leave behind a trail of regret or an echo of “What the heck did you do?!”

The “no” card in my front pocket is sponsored by type 1 diabetes. Ever since the autoimmune condition was set in motion in my daughter’s body and our family’s world, it has taught us many lessons, notably that perfection is impossible, control illusory, and the unexpected to be expected.

I may rise after a solid night of sleep and a yes will sit at the tip of my tongue to greet the day.

Other mornings, I may struggle to get feet to floor after a particularly broken night. I will step on a now dried alcohol wipe, pass a juice box, and curl my toes to retrieve a used glucose test strip up from the rug as I rise like a zombie, single-mindedly extending index finger to ignite the coffee machine into life, eyes half-closed.

On these days, I may question what I agreed to when I was feeling more human. I will rouse my favorite person, who may also be slower than usual to emerge from beneath the covers.

Other days, my flow may be stunted by an unwelcome surprise. A glucose monitor may decide to enter early retirement without our consent, an insulin pump may enter full opera mode, sounding an unending high-pitched aria of panic that signals the dramatic end of its tenure. A device may also decide to perform a disappearing act, finding its way out of skin and onto floor.

My child’s body may also choose to play tricks on us. One day, insulin will hit like water, and next day the smallest drop of the same elixir will trigger a plummet in blood sugar levels.

Whenever any such scenario presents itself, much like a joker card that you don’t see coming in the deck stacked opposite you, you will likely feel ready to call for a time out. I know that I am. You will ask the universe to deal you a skip a turn card. You may excuse yourself to the bathroom to collect your thoughts or decide that a bubble bath at noon is just what the doctor ordered.

Faced with an unpleasant unexpected turn of events, you will see a temptation to revise plans until further notice. You will want to claim what control you can grasp at and take on authorship to write the rest of the day on your own terms.

I experienced these feelings just last week when my daughter’s glucose monitor went on a brief hiatus, asking us to hang tight until further notice, and then coming back with a heart-thumping “urgent low” reading following an eternal 15-minute work break. We were returning from school at the time and she was in the thick of kindergarten emotions coated with the heavy feels of difference. She was brooding on the gaze of classmates as she took sips of juice in the afternoon, she was frustrated by the itchiness of her devices, she was stewing in the angst that a girl in her class had laid fingers on the already fraying sticker around her monitor.

A new task now awaited us upon return home: Her glucose monitor, clearly more than a little confused following its return to consciousness and on its way out of her body, would need to be replaced. The afternoon would now include a quick bath to freshen up and the placement of a new device, quick because we had other non-diabetes business on the agenda.

It was one hour until my daughter’s trial violin lesson. I was ready to pull the diabetes card. My fingers reach for it in the same way after a particularly broken night when I want to slip into bed next to my daughter and hold her until it feels right to wake. I wanted to pull it because it felt easier to let the new monitor finish warming up, to cross my fingers hard that my hand had magically selected the “bright” one of the bunch from the available boxes stacked in our diabetes cabinet, and to stay home to snuggle up on the couch together next to a tower of books.

“I want to cancel the lesson, reschedule for that Saturday slot they had…” I started to tell my husband, but we both finished the sentence with the same conclusion: I had to go. As I knew and as he reiterated in the moment, diabetes would always be there. But life had to go on without bowing to its capriciousness, without being paralyzed into fear, without letting it deal all the cards. When it would have been easier to skip a turn, I had to make my next move, the one I’d planned before monitor drama decided to sound the alarms.

When you decide to go on without being ruled by your condition, you can appreciate the decision in retrospect. The lesson helped us to forget about the monitor. I could watch my daughter turn her mind to the names of strings and giggle at a mnemonic close to her animal-loving heart: Good Dogs Always Eat. I could hear her front tooth click on the bus as her tongue jostled it forward and back, begging her to please spare this one from the fate of the last, swallowed in a mouthful of popcorn. We could return home to share in comfort carbs of homemade naan and write stories together at the dining room table.

But more important than the tales of dogs learning to share a shiny red ball or the stinky restaurant or the adventures of Toutounez, brought to life under my daughter’s prolific right hand, was the one we were authoring together as a family. It is a story of many morals. Perhaps the biggest lesson of all is this: You can’t control the cards you’re dealt in this life. But it’s up to you to decide what comes next.

We taught ourselves this when we decided to go ahead with the European family vacation days after diagnosis and hospital discharge. The decision looked like struggling to perform blood sugar checks in a closet-sized Parisian hotel. It looked like the first unconfident attempts at dosing insulin for buttery, flaky layers of croissant. It looked like my daughter skipping along the Seine, eyes wider as the Eiffel Tower burst into a dazzling display of flashing lights while we floated past it on a bateau-mouche. It felt like freedom.

Today my daughter was honored with an award for self-discipline at her school-wide assembly. I suspect that even her kindergarten teacher who nominated her doesn’t understand just how deeply she embodies this quality. Self-discipline means taking control of your thoughts and emotions to chase your goals and get things done even when it’s hard, even when it’s uncomfortable, even when it would be easier not to. It means reaching out and picking up the next card when it would be easier to skip a turn or sit out the next round. Because diabetes will always be the wild card, but it’s not the only card, and you must never forget that you hold the deck in your hands.