Not wanting to

'I don't want to. I just don't WANT TO.'

Those were the words that Grace said to me when I mentioned that it was Pod change time. She was about to 'expire' in a few hours, and I didn't want to do a middle of the night Pod change.

'I understand, you don't want to. But we have to. It's already started. I deactivated the other Pod, so it has to come off and a new one on.'

'I DON'T want to. I just don't want to do it.'

And instead of me stating again why she has to do it, why she must do it, why it isn't negotiable and why it doesn't matter, in the end, that she doesn't want to, but she just has to... I hug her.

I hug her hard and whisper in her ear.

'I hear you honey. I hear you. You don't want to do this anymore.'

And she cries and says 'Yeah.'

I try and say all the right things - I try to understand what it must be like to do this every three days, to wait for the 'shunk' of the cannula into the skin, to have this damn Pod hanging off me every bloody second of every day, to bolus for every thing she eats, for all the finger pricks and the blood and well, all of it.

I can try to understand, but I don't REALLY understand.

But I do understand that it must be hard. I have done some very hard things in my life for a very long time and I do understand the feeling of things being so hard that you don't know how you are gonna get up and do it one more damn day. That I do understand, in spades.

I tell her our mantra, that we don't have to like it, but we just have to do it. And I will be there to hold her hand, help her through it, and move on, so we can do the great things in life.

I tell her that.
And I also tell her that I understand hard.