Night Checks and Brave Fingers: Parenting a Child with Type 1 Stories

Inside this volume

Fifty first-person accounts describe parenting a child with type 1 diabetes. Children were diagnosed at eleven months, at two, in primary school and in their teens, often after weeks of thirst and tiredness mistaken for flu. The writers include mothers and fathers, a stepdad, two adoptive dads, a foster mother, grandmothers raising or helping with grandchildren, a widowed father working from his late wife's notebook, and a mother who left software engineering to learn it all. They write from Columbus to Cork, Lagos, Singapore, Southland and Recife. They describe pumps on toddlers, sensors a teenager refused to wear, closed-loop systems and a first full night of sleep, counting carbohydrates in rice and noodles, school plans, daycares that said no, sleepovers, camp, Eid sweets, Halloween candy, airport security and an evacuation bag packed in thirty minutes. Money runs through many accounts: a year without insurance, test strips harder to afford than insulin, letters to a medical aid scheme. Some stories are hard, including a seizure at two in the morning, a child who could not feel her lows, a teenager who stopped giving her insulin, and the burnout of the teen years. Others follow children all the way to driving lessons, college and university.

Who it's for

For parents, grandparents, step, foster and adoptive carers of a child with type 1 diabetes, whether the diagnosis came last week or the child is packing for university.

Format · Instant download · PDF & EPUB · Fifty first-person accounts · PDF: 231 pages

A collection of personal testimony, offered as companion reading — not medical advice.

• 50 single-author testimonies from real people
• A short, plain-language introduction to the topic
• Editor's note, contents page, and curated resource list
• Professional interior typesetting and an original cover

Every purchase includes a print-quality PDF (best for desktop, tablet, and printing) and a reflowable EPUB (best for Kindle, Apple Books, Kobo, and phones). Files are DRM-free. You can download both instantly from the order-confirmation screen, and we email them to your inbox as well, so your books are always within reach.