When You Know You've Done Enough

As a parent of a type 1 diabetic child, I struggle with the issue of, "Have I done enough as a parent to prepare her for handling things on her own?"
How do you REALLY know you've done enough?

Until you're put into a situation, then you really don't know. But a few days ago, I got my validation that as a parent, I've prepared Kacey to handle an "emergency" situation on her own.

So let me tell you how things happened.....

I love my Blackberry. It's 3 years old and it was past time for an upgrade but I was hanging on to it til I absolutely HAD to upgrade. The last 2 months, it's been causing me more stress than any Momma should have to deal with! It's been powering down on it's own and then taking 10-15 minutes to power back up. Those of you that have children with diabetes know how important having a phone is. That being said....on Tuesday afternoon, I picked Kacey up from school at 2:30pm and the conversation went something like this:

Kacey: Mom! Why didn't you answer your phone when I called?
Me: It never rang?!?! What's wrong?
Kacey: You gave me a heart spell today!! (her version of "heart attack")
Me: What happened?!?!
Kacey: I called you at 1:00 and your phone went to voicemail.
***insert my mind racing as to where I was at 1pm? Ahhhh....yes in the kitchen with Kayleigh and the phone had powered down...AGAIN!***
Me: My phone was acting funky again. Whats wrong?
Kacey: My pump ran out of insulin!!!
**insert a gasp and a gulp! You can imagine the paranoia that I went into because it was now 2:30pm**
Me: Why didn't you call me back? You should have kept trying!
Kacey: Mom!
Me: You should have let the nurse fill it!
Kacey: MOM!
Me: Get your stuff out and we will fill it now!
Kacey: MOM! LISTEN TO ME!
Me: **quiets down** What?
Kacey: It's already done. I did it on my own.
Me: You did WHAT?!?!
Kacey: When you didn't answer, I started to panic and then I sat quiet and cleared my head and knew what I had to do. I opened my case in my purse and I paniced again because I didn't have a new cartridge set. We forgot to put another one in there. But I got my spare kit in the nurses office and that didn't have a set either. It only had the old set. So I disconnected my pump. Took out the old cartridge. Unhooked the tubing. Put the needle from my Cozmo cartridge on my Ping cartridge and then I used tweezers and filled my pump to 70 units. I knew it would give me enough til I got home and we could refill a new one. Then I carefully got the airbubbles out, filled new tubing and reconnected. Please don't be mad at me for using my old cartridge.
Me: ***sitting mouth wide open** So you filled your pump and you've been reconnected since then?
Kacey: Yes! ***smiling*** I did what I needed to do to get the job done! Nurse J kept asking me if that was ok to do and I told her I gotta do what I gotta do because I need my insulin!

At this point I didn't know whether to scream and yell at my phone or cry tears of joy because she did what she did. She did it! She handled an emergency situation in an adult manner. She got the job done and she did a darn good job at it! I smiled all the way home through my tears. I knew in my heart that I'd done what I needed to prepare her to handle diabetes in a pinch.

Getting a new pump is always a scary thing. She's helped with site changes before but never unsupervised. So this was a BIG deal for us! And the most important thing is...she calmed herself enough to work through the process to keep her safe until she got home.

One word....AMAZING!!