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We found 10 result(s) that match your search "diabetes camp":

I've been feeling overwhelmed by life lately, not just on the diabetes front, but on all of them.  My toddlers are making me nutty, my 20 year old son is making decisions that I think are really unwise and my job bores me to tears most of the time. The only thing not driving me nuts is Olivia. Considering she's a 14 year old girl who's just been dumped by her boyfriend of six months, she's been pleasant to be around most of the time.

 

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For a number of years, I was the only diabetic I knew. Diagnosed when I was a little kid, there wasn't an army of advocates knocking down the doors of my school. As far as I knew, the only meter in my elementary school was mine. In my high school, there were two meters: mine and the one belonging to a classmate's older sister. No one else I knew was taking a fingerstick before having the orange slices at soccer practice, or before tap dance lessons.
My first taste of a diabetes community came one summer at camp. Growing up in New England, I had access to one of the best diabetes camps in the country - Clara Barton Camp. I spent six summers at CBC, giggling with my fellow campers, singing my lungs out at the nightly campfire meetings, and making friends. (READ MORE)

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Olivia heads off to Clara Barton Camp in a couple of weeks. This is her fifth summer attending, so she will become a Bartonian this year. I'm not sure what that means - fellow CBCers, help me out. She is beyond excited. I swear she'd live at camp all summer if I let her (and I had the funds - at $2,000 for 10 days, it's very, very expensive.)
I was initially hesitant to send her to camp. I was worried that she would be lonely, that she wouldn't speak up when she wasn't feeling well, that they wouldn't take care of her the way I do. The first time I left her, for her first mini-camp session, I cried the whole way home. I fretted and worried and lay awake at night, wondering how she was doing.
I shouldn't have. When I picked her up, she was ecstatic. She chattered non-stop the entire way home, talking about the other campers, the counselors, what they did, where they went and "There was a dance, mum! With the BOYS!!" She was over the moon. (READ MORE)

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My fellow blogger Nicole Purcell, wrote an amazing entry the other day called, How Do Our Bodies Do It? She captivates very brilliantly what it is like to experience a severe late night episode of hypoglycemia. Some of us, fortunately, have never had an experience quite like the one she describes. Others are all too familiar with them. Speaking for myself, I am one of the fortunate ones, who has only been dangerously low a handful of times. I have never been injected with a glucagon shot and I've never really lost consciousness due to a low. But still, I could definitely relate to her experience because I can recall the episodes where I was just so unbelievably out of it. But her post got me thinking of the time when I was a camp counselor at a children's diabetic camp.
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I took Olivia to camp today. It's always a little bittersweet for me to take her there. I miss having her at home, I miss seeing her around the house, I even miss (god help me!) her incessant playing of Hannah Montana CDs.
I remember the first year she went to camp. I was terrified. She was eight years old and had never been away overnight, except to stay with family members. I knew that Clara Barton would be a safe place for her but there was a part of me that wanted to cling to her, to hold her close, thinking that no one, no one was going to take care of her the way I could.
That first year she only did mini-camp. She stayed from Sunday until Thursday. When I went to pick her up, she bubbled over with stories of what they'd done, telling me about this girl and that girl, talking enthusiastically about their activities and games. It was wonderful to see her that enthusiastic. (READ MORE)

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A kink already.

 

I told Mom this morning about my new schedule. The one where my retired mother doesn't have to get up so early any more to be to my house by 7:15 a.m. to take care of the kids before school so The Mr. and I can get to work on time. She loved it, by the way. Also because she knows I need and want to exercise.

 

Not long after she left the house, though, she called to remind me that my plan to start my new schedule on Monday (I hate starting on Mondays) may need to be rethunk. (rethinked? reconsidered?) No. 1 and No. 2 start their two-week spring break on Monday and they are going to day camp. Camp that's on *my* way to work. Camp that *I* was planning to drop them off at around 7 a.m. on my way to work. Camp that I'm not sure I can convince The Mr. to take them to because it's slightly out of his way and will require him to give up driving his motorcycle to work for two weeks.

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When I was at diabetes camp as a kid, we played all sort of games around our diabetes. That was one of the best things about camp - the fact that diabetes was just another something that my camp friends and I had in common. We all brought sleeping bags to camp, we all wanted to go swimming on hot days, we all had diabetes.
One of our games was guessing what our bloodsugar levels were before the counselor told us the results. I loved this particular challenge, mostly because I often won. In the first years after my diagnosis, I could guess my bloodsugar within 10 mg/dl 9 out of 10 times. At camp, we'd all make our guesses, and I'd win. That's how it went... Among my many prizes, diets sodas from the camp Trading Post and lots of velamints. (READ MORE)

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Olivia's been at camp for five days now. It's always so much quieter around here when she's gone, but it's amazing how much I miss having her around. Oh, sure, the babies are still here, laughing and playing and crying and generally being their cute little selves, but without "LaLa" here, the noise level has dropped dramatically.
The phone doesn't ring, the computer only gets used once in a while. The Disney Channel does not get turned on at all. (No Hannah Montana! Whoohoo!) It's nice, but it's weird. She's always here.
I keep waking by her room and thinking "Gosh, what is she DOING in there?" And then I remember, duh, she isn't here. She's at camp. Having fun. Being a teen-ager. Going to the dances with the Joslin boys. Playing Cities and having backwards day and all sorts of other goofy things they do at camp. And while I miss her intensely, I wouldn't change that for the world. (READ MORE)

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Warning: the following blog post contains graphic violence, adult language and brief nudity. I may have slightly overstated the part about brief nudity, but it is indeed a full-on rant with some inappropriate language. To soften the vulgarity, I have inserted the word "frog" and variations of the word according to context.

 

The scene: Ice hockey camp, Princeton University.

 

It’s just so mother-frogging frustrating. I was worried that the ITILs (I think I’m lows) would make it hard for Charlie to enjoy his time at the camp. It didn’t take long at all before he looked at me through the frogging rink glass and flashed me the teetering hand - a gesture indicating that he could be low.

 

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Despite my initial rant, Charlie’s week of hockey camp was great. He had a blast. Once we settled into the routine and got the lay of the land, everything went more smoothly. After a week of tagging along with the hockey counselors all over the Princeton campus and dealing with some very badly behaved 7 and 8 year olds, I’m happy to get back to my normal life. Ha! Normal!

 

As they should be, the other kids were curious about Charlie’s pump. During the week, several kids asked Charlie what it was. Charlie educated a few and at other times, he’d defer to me.

 

"Does that hurt him?" one kid asked after I tested Charlie’s blood sugar.

 

Charlie held his finger out, accepted the prick with no reaction and then pulled his hockey mask over his head and darted out of the locker room toward the ice before I could even answer the boy.

 

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