Kallie didn’t really seem too phased about being in the hospital. Once she had regained consciousness and been moved to her own room, she seemed to be having fun. While she was still getting adjusted to her insulin pump and Alice and I were learning about the disease, she spent quite a bit of time in the pediatric ward’s playroom. She’d always been active, and we were learning how her various activities could effect the diabetes. But she would run around the ward all day long if someone had let her.

She adjusted to things very easily. The pump didn’t seem to bother her one bit, which I saw as a definite blessing. When I had to mess with it to set it, she didn’t even seem to care, and I was grateful for it. In fact, she took to it a lot more easily than I was able to. I was used to leading a healthy lifestyle, but there had never been any immediate dire consequences if I went off my diet a little or skipped a workout. It wouldn’t necessarily be horrible for Kallie to do those things every now and then either, really, but there was an ever-present risk there that I wasn’t used to.

Since she’d be spending time with the others, we asked them all to take at least one class with us. They agreed, although with the pump, there weren’t really too many rules aside from making sure she tested her blood sugar and having her eat before any sort of strenuous activity. Still, Alice was really worried about letting her out of our sight.

“She could have a reaction and go low out of nowhere,” she fretted to me. “What if that happens?”

I almost brushed that off as a needless worry, but I couldn’t dismiss it entirely. In the classes we’d been attending, we’d learned that even with very tight control over the disease, there was always the risk of a blood sugar reading that could be harmful to Kallie. While there were many precautions we could take, sometimes blood sugars shot out of control no matter what.

“Type 1 diabetics are always at risk of a low that could result in unconsciousness,” one of the nurses informed us during a class specifically for parents. “This risk is of course greatly lowered given proper treatment and precautions, but no one can prevent or predict them all. That means that you’ll need to be ready to treat a low on very short notice, which isn’t as tough as it might sound. There are signs to look for…”