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I weighed so little by then that she didn't complain. He was quite and solemn-faced as he looked at the papers with my test results.

"I'm afraid she does have diabetes," he said.

My mother gasped and blinked her eyes a few times. It is only one of two memories I have of her blinking like that as she processed a piece of information; the other was years later, as she contemplated her own cancer. I now know that on both occasions, she was terrified. Seeing her expression, hearing that I had just been sentenced to hell in spite of the fact that I was a good kid, I let out a wail and burst into tears.

Dr. Blackwell asked me if I wanted to come sit on his lap, but I shook my head and clung to my mother. I wanted nothing to do with the doctor. As far as I was concerned, he had giving me diabetes and was nothing but a big jerk.

"I don't understand how this could happen," my mother said, shaking her head in bewilderment. She spoke slowly, with halting breath. "I've never let her eat a lot of sugar. What could I have done to prevent this?" The way she asked this last question sounding like she was pleading.

"Nothing," the doctor said, "We don't know what causes it in children, but it's more severe than the kind that adults get, and it doesn't necessarily run in families. She'll have to take shots of insulin, there's no way around it. And you'll have to watch what she eats. Still, by in large, she should be able to live a fairly normal life."

That night, I would spend my first night in a hospital since the day my parents brought me home after I was born. The shots made me feel better. I was no longer hungry and thirsty all the time, and the hospital wasn't so bad. I still remember my mother sewing on my Halloween costume by my bed while I practiced giving my rag doll shots with real syringes. I adored the controls on the hospital bed that allowed me to move it up toward the ceiling and fold myself up like a taco. I liked running up and down the hallway until the nurses scolded me and made me go back to my room.

"I think you're the wellest little sick girl I've ever seen," Dr. Blackwell told me on a visit a few days later.

Thirty one years and thousands of shots later, I'm still hanging in there. I'm a wife and a working mom, not so different from millions of other women. I have, as the doctor promised, a fairly normal life, with fairly normal ups and downs.

Sadly, the person I need to thank for this, who taught me how to take care of myself and to do what I need to do in order to hang on to that normalcy, did not live to see me grown up. I have to look skyward and hope she can hear me when I say, "See mom? If you're watching me from Heaven, you know I'm okay. You didn't do anything wrong to make me get sick, but you did everything right to teach me how to stay well. I can't than you enough for that."

Learn more about this author, Nina Erickson.
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