Asking for Help

When my son was diagnosed, people from my community really wanted to help.  “What can I do?” they asked.  “Bring dinner?”

I didn’t want anything to do with those dinners— they just signaled a kind of carb-counting hell to me.  I needed food that was reliable, food I had prepared myself so I knew every single ingredient that was in it.  “No, thank you,” I said.  And I turned the help down flat.

But I certainly needed help — I needed lots of it.  I felt lonely and scared, and like no one understood what my family was going through.  But I had one friend — one very close friend — who would call and want to hear what was happening.  I would rattle off how many times I had been up in the night, or how frightening it was when I got caught out of the house unprepared for some emergency.  My friend listened and listened.  She asked a lot of questions.  And one day she said to me, “People think that diabetes is hard because of all the shots and the pokes, but it’s really the ups and downs that make it so difficult, huh?”

It’s always hard to ask for help.  But with diabetes it’s doubly hard, because the people around us, however well intentioned, don’t actually know how to help us.  Either they don’t understand enough about diabetes to know what we need most…or we feel afraid of asking for what we really need, knowing that the people who are offering their help have no idea what they’re getting into.  (“Wait, you’re telling me I need to be prepared to wake up — maybe more than once — so your kid can sleep at my house?”).  I was lucky enough to have a friend who cared to really ask and listen.  But the question is, How can we get the people in our community to understand diabetes —at least, enough that they can help us when we need it — without having to trust in luck?

On my diabetes journey, I’ve learned something important about getting the help I need.  I have to ask.

One of my favorite stories is of a woman who asked for exactly what she needed.  She was exhausted from the shock of her child’s recent diagnosis and from trying to explain a disease to other people that she didn’t quite understand herself.  So when a friend of hers asked how she could help, this brave mother was truthful. “If you are a true friend,” she said, "you will go learn about type 1 and then call me back. I cannot explain this to another person.” And, amazingly, that true friend did just that — she took a course online and then another.  She was able to dive deep enough to really be a support.

There are two morals to this story.  The first one is that, against all our expectations, this woman’s true friend stepped in and helped — she really did the work.  This story teaches us that such a thing is possible.  All those wishes you have but are afraid to ask for can really come true.

But the second moral is that they can’t come true unless we ask.  We have to tell people what we’re needing.  Otherwise, people can never support us in the way that we hope.

So many of us feel like asking for the help we need is too much of an imposition, that others can’t do it, that they don’t want to.  Certainly that may be true.  But I’ve found that many people want to help — they just don’t know what to do beyond making a dinner or planning a meal train.  If we are brave enough to ask — to ask for help to make that sleepover happen, to ask for them to learn enough to track the CGM so we can get a breather, to ask for them to take a short class so we can feel safe leaving our kid with them for the day, or to ask for them to just listen and learn to understand — they might just rise to the occasion.

I’ll share one last story.  My son — that same son who was diagnosed, all those years ago — reminded me recently of a time when his own college friend had come to stay in our home town for the summer.  I had loaned this young adult a few items for his sparsely furnished summer apartment, and when he thanked me profusely, I had said “It’s my pleasure. You’re giving me a chance to be my best self.”

My son is fond of this saying, and I think there’s real truth to it.  Oftentimes, people are good.  They want to help.  And in some ways, when we ask for the diabetes support we really need, we’re giving people the chance they’ve been looking for.