46: When You’re Far From Family and Diabetes is Lonely

Sweet Talk for Parents of Kids with Type One Diabetes

What a dilemma! To stay or to go? In this episode, I talked to a lovely mother who is debating whether she should move to live near her family who she knows can and will support her and her newly diagnosed daughter. The sticking point is that she also loves her job, feeling like she won the “career lottery” – and she isn’t sure she wants to give that up. Since her daughter is still in the first year after diagnosis, she came onto the podcast to better understand what will change with her relationship with diabetes. Will it get easier? And in what ways? Ultimately, she wants to know if diabetes will ever feel easy enough that she doesn’t need to make the move. But she also names how much she wants people to lean on who care about her daughter enough to learn about managing diabetes. Along the way in this rich conversation, we explore the loneliness she feels and her understandable need to have people in her life who can support her more with the day-to-day of diabetes.

Listen to hear more about:

• The ways that things change with diabetes after the first year
• The loneliness and sense of isolation when living with diabetes
• The challenges of building a diabetes community
• How people turn inward after diagnosis and how to shift that over time to build connection
• The profound sense of relief you can have when a connection does happen around T1D

Mentioned in this episode:

Need help getting your kid the right snacks?

That's why I've created the Sweet Talk Snack Course. It's a free mini-course to give you 6 snack sized lessons on making sure you're giving your kid the right foods to keep them nourished and their blood sugar in check. Get it at https://diabetessweettalk.com