Here’s an excerpt from the first chapter in my collection of Christmas Eve stories, The Night is O’er which is being released on Kindle today in honor of one who inspires me and for whom I am so honored to know. She has endured over 2,550 days with T1D, has endured 1450 hours of lost sleep testing her bg, correcting her blood sugar, having insets changed, drinking juice boxes…. She has stuck her finger over 15,250 times which is so much that she only needs to press on the end of her fingers in order to draw blood. We still await the cure rather than the management of this disease which seems to perpetually be ten years away. To all the T1D community and friends at the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF), thank you for your support, counsel, and encouragement. Maddie Lou, you are my hero.

From the chapter, “Christmas Counting”…

“I oftentimes fall into the pattern of reducing my life to counting integers–the equally subdivided ticks on a line which quantify the things which I believe important. All this data, this numbering, is meant somehow to bring a predictability and control to my life. I count sermons, days, dollars, compliments, mistakes, peaceful minutes, and miles. On December 5, 2009, I started counting a new line.

It took three days for what I believed to be true to be confirmed. It was forty-five minutes from when my wife picked up our daughter from school until she called from the doctor’s office with the results of two tests which confirmed the diagnosis that our youngest, one of three lovely children, had what 39 other children in the U.S. would be diagnosed with on that very day: Juvenile Diabetes (T1D).

It is eleven miles or twenty minutes from our house to the Wake Forest Baptist Hospital’s Emergency Room, and it is nine floors up Ardmore Tower to room 810 at Brenner Children’s Hospital where we would stay for the next three days. On the evening of the second day, I am nervous, as I prepare to administer my daughter’s fourth injection — her first full day of injections for the rest of her days, and she is nervous. She is nervous because in her mind it counts as a shot. I am nervous because I count it the same, and this is my first time giving one. Her blood glucose is down to 211 from the 305 it was at dinner. I inject her with an insulin called Lantus (one of two types she receives) with one of the new pen-type syringes, one of three ways to administer insulin.

My daughter’s life and her parent’s lives are now divided into threes and subsets of threes. Three meals a day before which she receives a dose of insulin based on her blood sugar level. Three meals a day with one snack in between. We count 180 grams of carbohydrates per day, forty-five grams per meal, fifteen grams per snack. We keep meticulous records of her blood sugar and the times it is taken. This vigilance gives power to the illusion that the accurate and diligent collection of data provides control. Control means safety, and safety means that when I wake up at 2:37 in the morning and am unable to resist going into my daughter’s room to check on her, probably for the second time that night, I will find her okay, and that she will remain okay until I wake her, before the eighth hour to measure her blood sugar and to give her first shot.

Growing up, I had imagined that my membership among the number of humanity would mean that I would one day, count. I had hoped that this addition would add up to success, achievement, and a decent though not ostentatious life — one that would be both moderately enviable and worth emulating.

Over the course of my life, my counting has taken different forms. As a child, I counted presents at Christmas time and meatballs in my Spaghetti-O’s at dinner time. As a teenager, I counted the “hutts” as center for the high school football team before I passed the ball through my legs to the hands of a team mate whom I should’ve counted a much closer friend for the intimacy we shared five days a week for four months each fall. As a college student, I counted years, semesters and class hours till graduation. After graduation, I counted the dollars for an engagement ring which I would give to one whom I counted above all the rest and whom I was counting on saying “yes”. In my first real job as a teacher, I counted down the classes to the end of the day, the days of the week to Friday, and the hours of the weekend till Monday. As a seminary student I was one of a graduating class of ninety or so, who were counting on positions in a church in which they would go to make a difference and whose lives would “count for Christ”. While working in the second of three churches, I would learn to number mortgage payments, diapers, bottles of formula, and doses of Tylenol. I had always hoped that I would count, but I never imagined those things which I would end up counting. And now, I count blood sugar and doses of insulin.”