When the topic for this month’s blog carnival came up, I immediately had a flood of things come to mind. There are a lot of little things I have done despite the fact that I was a diabetic, but diabetes always followed me through my journey. There were a few things, however, that I was reluctant to do or take part of because of diabetes, and I almost let it stop me from doing those things.

There are two awesome things so far in my life that I have done in spite of being a diabetic. One is marrying my husband. One may think, ‘Oh, whoop-dee-do, you got married, what’s the big deal?”. The big deal is that even though I loved him with all my heart, my biggest worry was did he really know what he was getting into? Not only was marrying me going to be challenging enough, but he was marrying my diabetes as well. Something that I had dealt with all of my life and even tried to shelter, for the most part, from him during our dating and engagement stage. Was he really up for the challenges that could  possibly present themselves in our marriage? I wasn’t thinking right. All I could think of was that he was marrying someone broken, that he would be better off with someone else. He proved me wrong just a few short weeks ago when he was there through one of the scariest parts of my life. He proved to me through that situation that it didn’t matter to him so much that I was a diabetic, but that I was his. A part of him. Which I think I always knew that, I was just too blind to see it.

In spite of my diabetes having always been at the forefront of my life before, I found someone who was able to look past my diabetes and love me for me.

The second most awesome thing that I have done in spite of diabetes was becoming pregnant, which is by no means in second place (there is no first or second place in this post – it’s a tie – just following the order in which they happened in my life). For years I thought it wasn’t going to be possible for me. And years after that, I was scared to death to try. I truly felt as if it just wasn’t meant to be for me. I couldn’t get an A1c within range. My diabetes seemed so unmanageable and horrible that I just didn’t want to take that risk. I had honestly settled to be an uncontrolled diabetic with no children than to strive for control and have my own children. It wasn’t until I found my new endocrinologist and, with his help, I started to see that control wasn’t the beast I had made it out to be. True, it is a pain in the rear, but he taught me that control wasn’t about every number being perfect, but how you handled an out-of-range number to get it back in line. So, with his help, and LOTS and LOTS of help from the DOC (Diabetes Online Community), I started taking control the best way I knew how. And, shortly thereafter, my A1c’s started to come down, and then came the possibility of pregnancy – the green light.

In spite of my diabetes being a pain in the butt to control and putting me at a higher risk of complications during pregnancy, I took the leap of faith and now am 16 weeks along in this wonderful journey. I am so glad that I was blessed to have had the right people come into my life and show me that being a diabetic didn’t mean I could never be a mom. And while the baby isn’t here in my arms just yet, to have heard that heartbeat in the ultrasounds and now to be feeling him or her dancing around in there is the most awesome thing I have ever felt.

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