We Adapt

We were sitting in the UVA hospital cafeteria— my parents, my sister, and I. It was late into a chilly February night. The nearly-empty cafeteria was filled with thick layers of tension. It was here that our parents told us our lives would never be the same.

“Your brother has been diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes,” my mom told us slowly, gently, her voice strung thin with exhaustion. “There’s no cure. This is going to be life-changing for us.”

Type 1 Diabetes. I had heard of Diabetes before that moment, vaguely, but I didn’t understand the significance of this diagnosis. I would soon learn, though: a Type 1 Diabetes diagnosis changes everything.

That day in 2015, my family’s life tipped upside down in a single day, a single moment. I never saw it coming. Back then, I was horribly afraid of change. I hated the unknown, dreaded the unexpected. And through the months leading up to that dreaded day, it was this fear that kept me in denial, ignoring the signs that pointed towards upcoming change.

My brother, Tyler, was only three back then. He was too little to notice his own symptoms, so the rest of us had to notice the strange shifts in his behavior for him. Ty was always thirsty all of a sudden. He was losing weight. He was becoming increasingly irritable, yelling and screaming constantly. Of course, I noticed these things. But I just waved them off, told myself it was fine.

Tyler’s symptoms kept worsening, however. So, that day in February, my parents decided to take Tyler to the ER. It’s funny how normal that day started out, how unsuspecting we all were. When I heard they were taking Ty to the hospital, I shrugged it off. Okay. Sure. They’d go, come back later with answers, and that would be that. 

It wasn’t that simple. The ER quickly sent Tyler to the main hospital in an ambulance, admitting him overnight. Finally, the fear set in. Something was actually wrong.

When my sister and I went to see Tyler that evening, there were anxious butterflies fluttering in my stomach. Then, in the cafeteria, our parents told us: Tyler had been diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes, or “T1D”— an autoimmune disease that occurs when the pancreas doesn’t produce insulin, so the body can’t convert glucose into energy. Because of this, Tyler’s blood sugar levels had been ridiculously high. That explained his symptoms— his thirst, his irritability.

“We’re going to have to monitor Tyler’s blood sugar levels at all times now,” my dad explained. “And we’ll have to give him insulin shots every day.”

I didn’t understand much of this. My third grade Human Body course hadn’t prepared me to understand T1D. But I understood this would be life-changing. That was enough to scare me. 

At some point I started crying, which made my mom cry, too. She hugged me and murmured, “It’s okay. Everything will be fine.”

But when she was crying as well, it was hard to believe it.

She was certainly correct about this being life-changing for us. T1D is a daily battle, a constant struggle, something you never get a break from. It took over our lives. The cabinet to the right of our kitchen sink was suddenly a stockpile of medical supplies. A backpack filled with emergency medications became a sixth family member that had to go with us everywhere. Worst of all, my three-year-old brother became a 24/7 patient, receiving insulin injections four times a day and several finger pricks each hour to check his blood sugar.

Looking back, I wish I’d been more helpful during all of this, less focused on myself. But I was eight years old, and all this terrified me. I remember hiding in my room while my brother screamed in protest to getting a shot. I buried my face in my pillows, angry at T1D, angry at our new life, angry at myself for being so selfish when my poor brother was being put through so much. I desperately wished our lives hadn’t changed.

Change isn’t easy. It strikes abruptly, taking us by surprise. Our family’s life was completely upended by T1D, and in those first stressful months, I was scared we’d never return to our “normal” lives again. And I was right— we never did.

Instead, something strange happened as 2015 drew on.

We began to adapt.

Ty started taking injections like a champ. My parents began to get the hang of calculating insulin doses. “Do you have the backpack?” became an automated question asked by any one of us whenever we left the house. Before I knew it, T1D became normal. Our normal. It wasn’t ever ideal. But it was our family’s new life, and we took it on together.

We adapted. Life threw us a curveball, our world tipped sideways, and we adapted. T1D still isn’t easy. I wish every day that there was a cure for my brother, so he could just be a normal kid. But Tyler is thirteen now, and his Type 1 is just part of who he is. He wears a Continuous Glucose Monitor proudly on his arm. He’s learning to manage his own symptoms. He’s adapting. We all are, every day.

I wish I could tell my eight-year-old self, that scared little girl in the hospital cafeteria, so petrified by change, that it’ll be okay. That she’ll learn to press onward through the unexpected, to be brave, to adapt. I wish I could show her a glimpse of my family’s day-to-day life now, so she could see how easily T1D fits into it.

When the unexpected happens, we adapt. We shift, we bend, sometimes we might even break, but then we get back up, put ourselves together again, and we move on. Maybe this time at a different pace. Maybe this time towards an alternative destination. Maybe this time down a whole new road altogether. But we still move. We press on.

We adapt.