My daughter. My sweet, beautiful, maddening daughter. She is 19. A typical teenager in college, if smoking pot, drinking until she gets alcohol poisoning and failing out of said college, is normal.

Now, many of you (ha, like anyone is actually reading this, but let’s pretend) would agree, this is normal college behavior.

And when I get real with myself, and take an honest look at my own college experience – I know I was NO DIFFERENT. Worse, to be honest.

My girl is cut from her momma’s cloth. Not that I am proud of my teenage behavior; I was an awful, rebellious pain in the ass. I smoked, drank, partied, pushed limits.  I put my parents through hell. College? I got kicked OUT -TWICE! That takes work (and by the way, I turned out just fine). So,  I get being crazy – pushing limits.

Being so similar is one reason why we are so close, but also,  the reason we butt heads so much. I did the stuff she does – and probably for the same reasons (lack of confidence, fitting in, finding myself, fear of rejection, poor body image…) But I am now older, wiser and know how stupid I was. So I feel compelled to push my wisdom on to her, even though I know, this is her journey, not mine.

Problem is this, her journey is a little different than mine.

My girl, is a Type One Diabetic. My girl, is a ticking time bomb of poor health. So WORSE than the aforementioned rebellion against college, she is also rebelling against her health, and this is what scares the hell out of me.

I was healthy. My pancreas worked. Hell I didn’t even know what my pancreas did, but it was just fine. My biggest concern was waking up in time for class. My daughter’s biggest concern is waking up for life. Literally. She could potentially die, every night.

Type 1 Diabetes 101.

• It’s different than Type 2. Type 2 is genetic, and mainly developed through lifestyle habits. It is also controllable, reversible, avoidable and varies in severity.
• Type 1 is rare, non reversible and unavoidable once her auto-immune disease targeted in on it. Once recognized in her body, this auto-immune disease destroyed her pancreas, so when she eats, she does not produce insulin. She is insulin dependent, meaning EVERY TIME she eats, she needs to give herself an insulin shot. She acts as her own pancreas.

It’s terrible. Yes, but this is doable. People manage this. It is very mathematical and prescriptive, but doable.  She has to (OK let’s say “should”) count her carbs to the closest number, eat high protein everything, make sure she injects the right ratio of insulin to carbs for her injections, correct when she’s high, eat when she’s low, monitor, monitor, monitor. And then, do all those things right and she still has to account for hormones, exercise, stress and daily issues like colds, and allergies that make her numbers fluctuate.

You know you feel when you’re hungry? SUPER hungry? HANGRY? Imagine that feeling, amplified by a thousand. Normal peoples’ blood sugars hover about 110-120. Even if you scarf a chocolate cake, your pancreas controls the madness; your blood sugar may notch up momentarily, but your insulin brings your sugars back down and your body just processes all that crap you just inhaled. Our bodies are quiet amazing.

My girls does not have that luxury. If she scarfs a chocolate cake, ALL that sugar would literally go in her blood stream, as she has no pancreas, to create insulin to counterbalance it. It goes straight in to her blood stream, and would shoot her blood sugar up over 700 or 800!

So when she is “high”, she feels like she is on crack. She gets sick, nauseous, migraines. Her eyesight goes blurry, she gets irritable and mad. Not to mention her body is wreaking havoc on her organs, her skin, her connective tissue, her nerves. Things aren’t regulating. They aren’t working, and this is how dis-ease starts kicking in.

And when she goes low? Drops down under 90? Well anything under 60 is life threatening. She could slip in to a coma and never wake up. But even being low between 60-90 makes her feel like she has been hit over the head with a sledgehammer. More headaches, sluggish fatigue, dizziness, irritability once again…and as Trump would say “bad stuff!”

It’s a fluid, chaotic and scary disease. I can’t imagine living with it. But I do know  how important eating right, and keeping those numbers balanced is. So does my daughter. But still, she doesn’t control it.

Go back again to those college years. Pizza nights, Bong-infused Cheetos and peanut butter binges. Late night kitchen raids and erratic coffee shop study jams.

Even a “good”diabetic would be challenged.

Problem is, she is not a “good diabetic”. Her Endocrinologist recently called her “critical”. An ER doctor, (when she went in recently to hospital because she was vomiting so much), told her she had the aged body of a 45 year old. That on a cellular level, she is aging much faster than she should be, because her diabetes is so out of control.

And the pisser? She can control this. She can’t get rid of her Type One Diabetes – but she can manage it. She can eat well. She can exercise, she can NOT smoke, she can NOT drink. She can be the healthy kid, but she is choosing not to be.

Early in our hellish relationship with T1D, when she started her rebellion, her doctors told us not to worry, that is would pass. That she would feel so terrible from not controlling it, it would drive her to control it.

But the even more terrible thing is, My Girl has gotten used to feeling bad. ALL THE TIME. She feels so bad, so consistently, this has become normal for her. Feeling like shit, is her every day feeling. She thinks this is her lot in life. She bounces between 60-400 on a daily basis. Her average number is about 250-300 (twice as high as it should be) and she is literally, destroying herself.

There are days, when her body somehow finds that magic number of 120. She is moving, exercising, her numbers are in check and she feels SO GOOD! She will even text me “mom, I feel so good, inspired….I’m 120 and am going hiking, making a juice…going to yoga!”

But then it ends. That blissful moment ends, almost like she feels she doesn’t deserve it. Like she is not allowed to feel good all the time. You’d think feeling SO GOOD would drive her to continually seek that out, but apparently, it is just too hard. She is too fearful to live the life she needs to stay within those magic numbers, so she let’s it go, without making it a priority to seek it. And I can’t understand that.

So along with her apathy, and almost  you can see why the added layers of parties, pass out drinking, smoking weed to eat even more, and all in all denial about her health, scare me so desperately.

I have a therapist who helps me view her rebellion against her health as a type of addiction. That, just like an addict, she knows what she needs to do, she has a hardship, yet she hasn’t been able to admit she is powerless over it, and Let Go and Let God. And so instead, it controls her.

That also, just like an addict, I can point out how her behavior can kill her. Worse, not kill her, but leave her paralyzed from a stroke or missing limbs from ruined nerves, or nephropathy (Kidney disease), or blindness…..all bad, and all very much a high probability in her world if she doesn’t get healthy. But she knows this, and me pointing it out tunes her out, and seems to cement her rebellious behavior even further.

We’ve tried therapy. Numerous. We’ve tried nutritionists, different endocrinologists, eating experts. But, she won’t go. She won’t apply what they tell her. Just like an addict in early stages of their disease, she thinks SHE can control this and “has it”, but she doesn’t. And just like an addicts mom, I have step back, and I have to realize that I can not change her, until she wants to change.

That is very hard to accept. How do I watch, and accept my daughter, my precious child, my first born, MY GIRL, my love…hurting herself?

I don’t have an answer. I just have a prayer. And that is this. That my girl, gets it soon. That my girl, lets God’s whisper in her ear become loud and become her truth. That my girl, never ever has to hit rock bottom, in order to start climbing back up.