Not too owie

Thank you everyone for your wonderful heartfelt comments - Dotter and I are both really touched.

I started off the day not so well - I forgot to take my evening meds last night, and didn't sleep well as a result... so with 5 hours of poor sleep under my belt, I headed off to Cooma. Bloody freezing day. Listened to Arvo Part's ethereal Berliner Messe while driving through the fog (which was widespread, even down at Bredbo), and then Queens of the Stone Age (rock on!). Found Dotter and lovely Mother-in-Law C at Cooma Park. We had hugs, and then hot tea and lunch. And hour later Dotter and I left for Canberra, and had a really smooth trip, not too much traffic. Then we had some retail therapy at Woden Plaza - check out our new tops at the exhibition opening tomorrow night! :)

Late this afternoon we had about an hour at Canberra Hospital, in the Paediatric Diabetes Unit (out patients) - we know the diabetes educators Wendy and Alison well already, and they saw us initially. Then the Dr came in too - a nice young woman (much more approachable than our regular specialist, who is away this week). It's clear that Dotter has Type 1 diabetes starting up - her antibody readings are astronomically high. This means that her body is definitely attacking the pancreas, and once started this process can't be stopped.

However Dotter's progress has been a bit unusual since being diagnosed with Type 2 last year. They think she has both Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes, which can happen sometimes, apparently. Her pancreas is still producing some insulin, for the time being anyway.

There are two types of insulin (which we all have in our bodies) - slow long-acting, and fast short-acting. I don't know any more yet - but suspect I will know more soon (don't think I have much choice in this!). Wendy gave Dotter her first long-acting insulin injection tonight. Despite being quite long (over 1cm) the needle is extremely fine, and doesn't draw blood. The injection goes into the layer of fat over the tummy. Much less painful than the regular finger prick blood tests she's been doing for months now - she barely felt anything at all. So that's one fear breached. Tomorrow Dotter will learn how to inject herself.

We're back at the hospital at 10am tomorrow, for another couple of hours of education and learning more about how to calculate the insulin injection doses and so on. She may need the short-acting insulin as well, which means injections before each meal. We need to learn about carbohydrate exchanges too.

The educators and doctor are really good at keeping you clam, and making each step achievable, and less frightening. So we're feeling mostly OK about the whole thing, on the whole...

Eyes falling out of head at the moment, I'm so tired. Need to make a good low-GI healthy dinner, though, and then I can collapse in front of my favourite TV shows, Inspector Rex and The Eagle (both on SBS). Hope to get some knitting time, I certainly need to switch off from today. Then an early night!!

The good news is I think we should both be at the Knit 1 Blog 1 exhibition opening tomorrow.

PS Dotter has updated her Blog - drop on over and say hi :)