Counting carbs as a means of survival

I’d known adversity during the Second Half challenge—the nagging hamstring injury, the scheduling conflicts, the time the hotel receptionist on a work trip informed me cheerfully of the complimentary beer and wine at the rooftop bar. Oh, come on! Free booze?!?

Then August 22nd happened, and shit got real.

The day started out beautifully: a sunrise photo shoot in Brooklyn Bridge Park followed by a 7:30am pickup match in Williamsburg (netted a hat trick in the 4-2 win…) and an honest day’s work at the office. Around 4pm, my wife Rebecca took our soon-to-be-5-year-old son Alexander to the doctor. He’d been peeing a lot, had a suddenly unquenchable thirst, and over the weekend his mood took a turbulent turn for the worse.

In hindsight, the signs were as clear as the urine blasting through his system. But it wasn’t until the doctor ran the blood work and saw that Alex’s sugars were off the charts that we got our diagnosis: type 1 diabetes. Or as my wife put it on the phone with appropriate urgency. “He probably has diabetes. We have to get the hospital right away.”

The next 48 hours were a blur of doctor’s meetings, family phone calls, tears, fitful sleep, and bad hospital food. As we quickly learned, type 1 diabetes is the more severe form of the disease, in which the pancreas stops producing insulin, a hormone needed to break down sugars and starches into glucose that can then be used for energy. It differs from type 2 diabetes, where the body continues to make insulin but no longer uses it properly.

Type 2 can often be controlled with diet and exercise. Those lifestyle changes matter with type 1 too, but no amount of effort will ever cause the body to start producing insulin again. Every carbohydrate that enters Alexander’s body will need to be counted and covered with a dose of insulin. There’s a lot of new technology that makes the disease more manageable, including a device that monitors glucose levels without the need for finger pricks, and a pump that administers insulin automatically. But my kid’s relationship to food and drink, and by extension my own, will never be the same again.

Leaving Mount Sinai that first night, the enormity and permanence of the situation started to settle in. Diabetes had landed like an anvil in the middle of our world, and it was here to stay. My first instinct was to deep-six the Second Half and go sprinting into a six pack. Fortunately, I was too tired to do anything other than collapse in a heap on the pullout sofa at my in-laws’ place on the Upper East Side.

I was up with the sun the next morning, a routine I’d started with my training a month earlier. As I made my way back to the hospital, I realized that the strength, structure, and endurance that this process was giving me would be essential in the days, weeks, and, yes, years to come.

Alexander at his 5th birthday party, five weeks after his diagnosis.

Some days after the diagnosis, a friend offered comfort by talking about how Alexander is going to be in control of his body better than anyone. It brought back an earlier moment in the hospital when Rebecca had broken down in front of the doctors. “What’s going to happen when he’s 14 and wants to try beer?” she cried. That recalled my own adolescent impulses and escapades, when I didn’t just try beer so much as become one with it.

It’s heartbreaking that Alexander got hit with diabetes, and that his life is forever altered as a result. But if I had to find my own bright side, I see how, at 5 years old, he’s gaining discipline and self-knowledge that, at age 43, I’m only beginning to work on. I watch him prick his own finger to take a blood sample, or listen as he and his big sister problem solve the upcoming Halloween haul, and it’s like a tiny piece of my universe clicking into place.

Like the saying goes, sometimes the child is the father of the man.