Isn't a honeymoon supposed to be fun?

Now a honeymoon is supposed to the beginning of a beautiful life full of memorable moments and should be unforgettable. Sounds great doesn't it? I look back at the decision to call the start of your life with T1D as the honeymoon period to be grossly misrepresented.

The Honeymoon period is the beginning of T1D where the beta cells in your pancreas are still producing some insulin. At undefined times, even though it isn't to the full extent, insulin is created to break down the sugar in the blood stream. This plays havoc in every sense of the word.

At the time where you are trying to work out a baseline of what is needed to ensure you can keep the body in a safe range you are then thrown a curveball and what you thought was working now is either way too much and causing BSL's to drastically drop and Hypo's set in. Or the natural insulin stops and you no longer have enough causing you to feel terrible with high blood sugar.

What you also have to be careful of is that before you make any changes to what you are doing you need to wait for a pattern to form so that you can be sure the reason for the high or low was just not a one off. This can be frustrating and just plain annoying.

My daughter is right in the middle of this and it is difficult to know what is correct or not. For example during the night no matter what changes we make to a basal rate or sensitivity overnight it has little effect on the BSL. If she gets up to 11 mmol we now know not to correct as we know that over the next 2 hours it will drop down to 5 or 6 and once it gets to that point we also know that she needs to to have a bottle that we will only bolus 1/2 of what is required during the day and that will keep her just in the acceptable range.

As you can imagine the difficulty in managing what is required combined with having the difficulty period during the middle of the night and lack of sleep is challenging to say the least. We wake on a regular basis to make sure she hasn't gone hypo and we worry each and every second.

The "honeymoon" period has only one similarity to the conventional honeymoon and that is that it is something that you will not forget the moments within that period. This is not fun and full of memorable experiences however the ability for my daughter to accept and adapt is amazing. My wife tells it best after being awake for what seems like days at 4.30am after doing another BSL and thinking that our daughter was sound asleep, all of a sudden a hand comes out and touches her cheek and says "I love you mummy". At that point you realise how well she will get through it and how strong she is and will become.

Thankfully I am full aware that even though this stage is ridiculously difficult I know that over time this stage will finish and that the hard work that we will put in will make a great foundation to what will be a life of challenges.