HAWMC#2: Inspirational Quote

Today's Health Activist's Writer's Month Challenge is to write about an inspirational quote.  I immediately hit Pinterest. If you click the picture above, you will see that I have a board of words that inspire me.  This is a quote that I recently found that inspires me.  When I googled the quote to find the author, I could find no attribution, just that it is an anonymous quote.

I used to have a really bad habit.  When things were crazy in my life or seemed out of control, as a way of getting through it, I would fixate on the next "good" event.  I would count it down and anxiously await it.  That would help me get through whatever moment of craziness I was experiencing.  And I had some pretty severe moments of craziness.  My health focus is Type 1 Diabetes.  But early in my marriage, I had undiagnosed Poly-Cystic Ovarian Disease and Bi-Polar and on top of that my husband worked out of town.  

He was only able to come home 1 weekend every other month during the winter months.  I had 3 children.  The oldest was 7 and Seth and Leah were babies, just 17 months apart.  The babies were actually born during this time after several years of infertility.  I was living day to day and it was not pretty at my house.  

Eventually I found an incredible doctor who listened to me and got me the help I needed.  I look back on that time now and realize that all of the moments that I fixated on to help get me through were good, but I don't have a great recollection of my babies and the significant moments in their lives.  They happened.  I was there and it was all documented (thank heavens for scrapbooks), but I was so focused on the other things to help me cope, that I don't have a lot of memories of them.

When I found this quote, it tugged at my heart.  This was my life, I was in the middle of a storm and I was just WAITING for it to pass.  Waiting and missing out on all the magical moments.  

Earlier this month, we took a long awaited and much planned trip to Walt Disney World.  I had dreamed of doing this since I was a little girl.  I could not wait to see Cinderella's Castle!  The morning arrived that we were to go to the Magic Kingdom and the girls and I got up and got ready, but when we opened the hotel room door we were met with ginormous raindrops.  The girls and I chose not to be discouraged.  We headed to the Magic Kingdom, viewed the castle through raindrops and bought Mickey ponchos.  I got to experience the pure joy of watching my girls skip through puddles and dance in the rain, it is a moment I will never forget.

We are choosing to dance in the rain and live our life.  Seth's diagnosis rocked our world, and there are days that are hard, but I wrote a blog post January 20th, about 2 weeks after his diagnosis that I think sums up our take on it:

I came across a diagnosis story today on a blog and this mom shared something that her daughters wise and kind nurse said to them their first evening in the hospital...after my pity post earlier, this quote really jumped out and empowered me:

"He told us that we were beginning a life long journey with diabetes and the sooner we made friends with it, the easier it would be because it is much easier to carry a friend than an enemy."

These words spoke to my heart.  I can't fight this, it's not going to change anything.  There is no cure.  There is only acceptance, after all, what is the alternative?  

So diabetes:  We didn't invite you into our family, but since you are here...we fully accept you in our lives so that we may live with you on OUR TERMS.  You will not hold us back or define us, you will just be another part of our story as we continue to live our extraordinary life. 

The Dustins

Living with T1D

I think my quote pretty much epitomizes that.  We are not waiting for the storm of T1D to pass, we are dancing in the rain!