Can your hospital team put you in touch with any other families with T1 kids of a similar age? It's nice if you can get together with similar families, then the children feel more normal and can all test and inject together and discuss their condition with others who are just like them. Or not, if they'd rather just play games and do things that non-diabetic children do. And it's nice for the adults to get together and have a moan with other people who really do understand, you realise that other people have exactly the same worries and issues as you do and you can swap stories and suggest solutions.
I'd definitely get your DSN (diabetes specialist nurse) to visit the school to back up your argument, and explain that if your daughter is playing up they should check her blood sugar first, if it's normal then you can probably put that one down to a normal teenage outburst, if not then obviously she needs help not punishment! Might counselling help her too? Our diabetes team includes a counsellor who is specifically trained in diabetes so she understands exactly what sort of problems and worries it can bring.
Also, she's only been diagnosed a year, even though on the face of it she's doing very well with it, underneath she might still be coming to terms with the fact that this is her life now and it's completely relentless and she can never have a day off from it, that's one of the hardest things to get used to I think. And you need to grieve for your old life that you no longer have, it took me 6 months before I could cry at all and then another 6 months before I really let it out properly, and I'm not the one with it! I dread to think what it was like for my daughter, she didn't like talking about it
Schools really vary, at primary school my daughter's class teachers were always very good once I'd gone in and explained things to them at the beginning of each year, we did have some issues with other staff though who thought they knew better than I did how to manage my child's medical condition and wouldn't listen when I tried to explain, which was rather annoying and spoiled things somewhat for her a couple of times. Also I think the friends who grew up with her got bored of her being different and weren't particularly sympathetic, in fact in year 6 some people still thought it funny to hide her bag with all her test equipment and hypo treatments in
😱😱 (she didn't tell me about that until after she'd left that school and it was too late to do anything about it, probably because she knew I'd have gone absolutely mental...). When it came time to transfer to secondary school I was dreading it, in the end she didn't go to the local secondary school with everyone else, but to another a bit further away where she knew no-one else at all, and it turned out that having a completely fresh start is the best thing she ever did. She has some fab friends now, some who can spot hypos before she can, and the school are really supportive and have got the diabetes absolutely nailed, so we have been lucky. She has a medical pass so that teachers have to let her out of the lesson to go to the medical room at any time if she feels unwell, and a toilet pass so they have to let her go to the loo if she needs to (particularly if she's very high). She gets priority at lunch time too, and in exams can sit in a smaller room instead of the main hall and can have the clock stopped if she has to deal with anything diabetes related in the middle of the exam. Daughter now seems much more confident and doesn't mind so much talking about her diabetes now, at primary school she really couldn't stand being different and hated having to talk about it to anyone. She has just been on a 4-day school trip to France, had a whale of a time and came back with all sorts of stories (which she obviously found highly amusing) about how nervous the staff were when she was doing her pump refill, how most of the children on the trip had a real education about what diabetes is and were making comments about "I've never seen anyone being force-fed cola before" etc, how the only female staff member was a science teacher who said that when diabetes comes up on the curriculum in year 10 she will let my daughter run the class if she happens to have her then, and so on. Such a change in my daughter's attitude, she has had over 6 years now to get used to it but also the change of school was amazing. I hope you can get your daughter's school on side too, it really helps!
I can't think of anything else to add at the moment, but I hope you can sort something out with the school. Good luck
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