Educating the world about Reactive Attachment Disorder through experience, hope, humor and love.
(Warning: nothing here should be taken as medical advice)




Friday, April 6, 2012

Time to Sink or Swim?

Next week is Spring Break.  In the past we have always kept our daughter close at hand when she didn't have school.  Primarily because if we cut her loose, we'd have to allow her to carry her insulin with her and she doesn't have a good history with that.  In fact, her history with that has been to eat a ton of carbs, inject large amounts of insulin, and then not tell us about it so we end up giving her more insulin and then spending all night long stressing on keeping her blood sugars up so she doesn't die.  It doesn't make for a fun time, I can tell you that.  So her last diabetes doctor agreed with us and we took her insulin away.  It has been a year or so now and we still keep the insulin in a lock box at home and school.

But we're in a new place and she has shown signs of healing, so we're thinking perhaps it's time to see what happens.

Of course, this could go either way, and I can't tell you how much I'm stressing over it.  I'm pretty sure she's ready to handle the responsibility, but there is a part of me that keeps reminding myself "well, you thought that last time, and the time before, the the time before that...".  Times which resulting in CPS investigations and sleepless nights, times which were wrapped in lies and half-truths and resulted in potentially life-or-death situations that required adult intervention to make sure they ended up on the 'life' side of things.

But she's 16.

Going on 12.

We don't ask for perfection.  We expect things to be rocky.  Really all we ask is that she be honest about things and do her best to manage her blood sugars.  She does know how to do it, she has ever since she was little.  She chooses not to, and that's what frustrates everybody.  More than a few people have told us to "let it go".  But had we followed their advice, she would be dead.  Literally.  So thank you for the advice, but we're going to continue to stress over it until we know she "gets it".

And I'm praying she gets it before next week....

1 comment:

  1. Does your daughter like to read? My 14 year old RADish really doesn't like to read...until I found a particular series of books about girls who have overcome things like depression, OCD, residential treatment. They are true accounts and written so ages 13+ could understand. My daughter also just devoured the book by Jessi Jogsett called Detached. It's about the healing and RAD. He has RAD.

    Finally, does she like to write? Maybe a blog? My daughter has had such moments of healing through blogging - more so than just keeping a personal journal.

    Just throwing out some ideas. I don't know much about your daughter or how she spends her time. We went through spring break a couple weeks ago. I was prepared for the worst, and it was actually not half bad. I keep my 14 year old RADish busy with reading and blogging.

    I hope all goes with with your break!

    take care!

    ReplyDelete