I know what you look like.
No matter how small you are, when I think about you, I have a perfect image that forms in my mind.
You are tiny, but this doesn't make you any less vicious. You have thin spindly legs, and feet that are calloused and rotting from the excess sugar that feeds your existence. Your body bulges on top of your matchstick thighs, making you seem ridiculous. Your skin is an eerie green that shimmers slightly as you run across my daughter's skin leaving traces of glucose. Dark patches glisten where infection resides under your outer layer, the infection that is man-made insulin. Your mouth is greedy, your teeth are long gone and your gums are bleeding from overdosing on sugar. Yet still, your eyes are hungry, the desperate addiction sits behind them, glows in fury.
Late at night, when sleep escapes me, when my daughter is running high sugars because you are cheating the rules once again, I see you. In my mind's eye I see you laughing, high on glucose, leaping over the injection sites that scar her body, creating lumps so she can't use them again. I imagine you pushing hard against the needle as it breaks her skin, forcing out her life saving drug as it makes your drowsy and incomprehensible.
I know you wait for dark, that is when you make yourself known to us, that is when you scare me most.
In the daylight hours, we are your master, we can make you disappear.
You wait for a child to sleep before you enact your revenge, before you fill her with sugar, destroy her insulin. You drive her blood sugar readings high into the twenties, causing her to wake from sleep, hot and confused, thirsty, tired, overwhelmed with the need to use the bathroom.
You attack her at night, and then she struggles through the day.
You cheat, you break the rules, you are trying to hurt my baby.
But I see you, I watch you limp when we manage her ratios well, I watch your gums bleed. I see your skin start to darken, and I know we will beat you.
Did you hear my daughter this week?
Did you hear her at her diabetes clinic when she was tested on you?
She knows all about you, how to control you, how to manage you, she also knows you cheat, break the rules and have no respect for fair play.
Did you hear what she said when the nurse asked how long she would live with Type 1 diabetes for?
"Until I am 18 of course." was her reply.
I saw you raise a bruised eyebrow and a dirty smile tainted your foul lips. You were mocking what you saw as ignorance.
The nurse looked crestfallen, she had answered every other question with knowledge far beyond her years.
"What do you mean, Molly?" he asked.
My daughter brushed her hand over her leg, over her favourite injection site, I watched as you fell off her skin and struggled to climb back on board.
"When I am 18, someone will have invented a cure, or if not I will."
I watched as your smile faltered, as you shrunk a little smaller, as you realised that you chose the wrong opponent in my daughter.
Trust me, your days are numbered, my daughter will beat you.
Jane is a working Mum of three and has great hair. One of these things may not be true.
Blogs at: Northern Mum
Twitter: @JaneBlackmore