I've had the "she will grow out of it, won't she?" comment a few times (if only!), and just lately we seem to be finding loads of people who think it's perfectly ok for daughter to eat pizza and chips (loads of carbs in that!) but if she eats one single biscuit she will probably drop dead, when I try to explain that's not how it works and she can pretty much eat anything as long as she matches it with the correct dose of insulin, they look at me as if I'm completely mad and don't know how to look after my own child. My daughter gets fed up with people asking her why she can't eat sweets.
We have had a couple of incidents at school with know-it-all teachers who think they know better. French teacher was doing a food tasting session so I went into school to ask her what they would be eating so I could help daughter get a rough idea of what the carb count would be. Teacher kept saying it's ok, i'll only give her the cheese. No, said I, she can have the pastries too, we just need an idea of what they are and how many so that she knows how much insulin to give herself, but as soon as I mentioned the word "insulin" all I got was "oh no no, can't have that, I'll make sure her class only get the cheese." I had to give up in the end as the woman just wasn't listening, so daughter's class ended up with bread and cheese (and not much bread at that) and the other class got all the yummy pains au chocolat etc. Which is exactly what we DON'T want happening 😡
We also had an incident at the Christmas party at school. DSN taught us a good trick with the pump to enable daughter to be just like her friends at parties and stuff her face with biscuits and cakes etc without her blood sugars going into orbit. Basically enter a large number of carbs (e.g. 200) and put it on a multiwave bolus with 50% up front and the rest spread over 3 hours. This has worked brilliantly in the past, blood sugars afterwards are bang on normal whereas if we tried to carb count that amount of sugar properly they would probably be about 20!
At this party daughter set up the bolus correctly, helped herself to a plate of biscuits and then got a load of nosy teachers saying "you can't eat those, you'll have to stick to sausage rolls". Daughter told them that she could eat them and in fact had already taken the insulin for them and would have to eat them now, but they ignored her, class teacher was out, they looked for last year's teacher but she was also out, then eventually they rang me. All this time daughter was not allowed to eat anything, by the time they had cleared it with me most of the food had gone so daughter didn't get anywhere near as much as she had bolused for. At home time we stopped the remainder of the bolus going in but still had to shovel sugar down her throat for the next hour in order to avoid a major hypo. I spoke to the teachers concerned and they kept saying "she had an enormous plate of biscuits you know" and looking at me as if I was the one who didn't understand when I said yes she could eat them because she'd taken an enormous amount of insulin to cover it!
I do get why people don't understand diabetes, and there are a lot of misconceptions around it; I don't mind people asking questions if they listen to the answers - I do get a few people, when witnessing the finger pricking/carb counting/bolusing routine for the first time, that then ask rather incredulously "do you have to do that every day?" Which I find rather amusing! But the ones who think that they know better than we do, when we have to live with it 24/7 and they don't , I find VERY annoying! Especially when they won't even listen to my daughter, she's 9 now and understands her condition pretty well. Certainly better than they do!
