Presenting, in comic strip form, texts with my husband and fellow co-caregiver, wherein I just text letters to get his attention about a rapidly dropping low blood sugar, and autocorrect adds title inspiration: hanks link.

Parenting a young child with diabetes is a mixture of all-the-time-low-level-anxiety and anger/worry/warrior/defeated super vigilance, so it’s better to have two capable people on the front lines. My husband and I have a complementary approach to care; I’m the letter of the law and he’s the spirit of the law, and for our son to balance the burden of T1D across his lifetime, he’ll have to be both.

One random morning in March almost two years ago, my husband and I were learning to test each other’s glucose, but now we’ve tested Henry’s glucose over 6,000 times (20 months X 10 or more times a day). Every two days we change a site for his insulin pump and every seven days we insert a CGM (constant glucose monitor). About every 45 minutes, one of us looks at our phones to see where his blood glucose is, and every time we ever give him anything to eat or drink for.the.rest.of.his.life, we calculate the carbs and apply insulin or sugar.

I’d do this for Henry for the rest of his life if I could, but I know that living a life of independence, freedom, and self-sufficiently means I’ll teach Henry to care for his diabetes little by little, and that crushes me, because right now my husband and I are working really hard to replicate a pancreas, and it takes sleep,

my nightly alarms

brain-space, sacrifice, hauling gear, literal hours from our day, money, and focus. Type 1 diabetes is a heavy burden to share, but it seems insurmountable to carry alone.

November is both Diabetes Awareness Month and National Family Caregivers Month. Before my son was diagnosed with diabetes, I thought caregiving was typically something the younger did for the old. In it’s more raw version, caregiving reverses its normal evolution and becomes something the older does for the younger, either for a lifetime or a portion of a lifetime. Now that we’re parents who are also caregivers, I see how many other parents share this joint occupation, so this November, Semisweet will be highlighting stories of parents who are caregivers.

To kick off the discussion, please check out this great video, “I Am the Pancreas,” by Rick Suvalle, dad of two T1D kids. He followed his son and daughter around for a few days with his iPhone to show what caring for T1D kids is like. To the parents of young T1D kids: we are the pancreas!