Golly, where to start!
The best one probably was a friend who watched me injecting my daughter shortly after she was diagnosed, and said “i don’t know how you can do that, I couldn’t!” (Er, given that the alternative is certain death, I think you’d probably find that you could...)
“She will grow out of it won’t she?” (I wish!)
“Do you have to do that all the time?” When watching the finger pricking palaver just before a meal
During the time at primary school I got the distinct impression that some members of staff thought it was all a bit of a fuss about nothing, unless they were faced with a hypo that needed more than one lot of glucose to fix it and then suddenly there was big panic! And one of the first aiders at her current school seems to expect glucose to be an instant fix (she has Dexcom sensors now with constant readout on her pump) and I had the woman on the phone one day wanting to know why the pump was just reading LOW (=less than 2.2) and there was no immediate improvement after she’d downed a glucose drink; so I had to explain that although glucose works faster than anything else it still has to go through the stomach first and that takes time, which is why the rule is don’t check levels again for 15 minutes. Also had the same woman asking why she didn’t immediately start coming down from a high after injecting insulin; well insulin doesn’t work as fast as glucose so you probably have to wait longer than 15 minutes to see the effect of that!
The most annoying are people assuming that she can’t eat certain things and then don’t listen when you try to explain that actually she can eat anything as long as she gives herself the correct dose of insulin with it. Actually had teachers trying to prevent her from eating biscuits at a Christmas party when she’d already bolused the insulin for them, then when I arrived to pick her up I had to shovel glucose down her for most of the next hour to try to prevent a massive hypo. And then one time in a French class they were going to be doing food tasting, so I went to see the teacher to ask what foods would be involved so that we could get a rough idea of carb count. Stupid woman would NOT listen, every time I mentioned the word “insulin” you’d think I’d sworn at her, and my daughter’s class ended up only being allowed to try the cheeses and the other class got all the pastries, which was exactly what I was trying to avoid! I did wonder afterwards whether it would have helped if I’d explained to the teacher that my daughter isn’t using needles to inject her insulin, she just has to push a few buttons on her pump, but maybe it wouldn’t, the woman clearly knew exactly what she thought was required and wasn’t going to accept anything else! Those ones annoy me the most, don’t tell me how to look after my child’s medical condition unless you’ve been to all the hospital appointments with us!!
Thankfully most of the staff at her secondary school are much more switched on and LISTEN when I tell them how to deal with things...
