For The Dogs Dog Team Helps Teen Face Diabetes

When I was 12 years old, I became an insulin-dependent diabetic. I’ve been told it was not an overnight occurrence; nevertheless, I woke up one day with diabetes.

Talk about rude awakenings. This is worse when I try to sleep in on Saturday mornings and my little brother sees how close he can get to me before he yells “IT’S TIMETOWAKEUPTAWNYA!”

But I’m not talking about the single rude awakening that happened one summery June morning when I learned I was diabetic, but about each reverberating rude awakening that will happen every day for the rest of my life.

I had enough problems with trying to fit in, dealing with growth spurts and other factors of growing up without having to manage some other hormone my body should produce on its own. Really! You would think with all the hormones a teenager’s body is shooting around, mine at least could have put some insulin in there, but it was not to be. As I entered adolescence I was taking on a lot of responsibility. My normal diet was impeached as my body needed less sugar and more healthy food. Aside from avoiding candy bars and pastries, I had to watch for sweeteners in juice, cereal and, yes, even salad dressings. What a pain my life began to be as I tried to scrape myself off the bottom of life’s steamroller and become human again.

Or was I human? I didn’t feel human anymore. I felt like some walking, talking, diseased fluke of nature. My immune system had been weakened since the onset of diabetes and I missed a lot of school. There was no reason to live anymore. Diabetes began to control my life, because I couldn’t eat this or that or exercise too hard. At all times, my blood sugar needed to be checked. If it got too low or too high, I could slip into shock and die.

What I needed was a plan, a strategy to deal with my diabetes. When it came, it weighed 80 pounds, was smarter than most humans I know and had a wet nose. I called him Nephi.

I got a dog. Nephi and I both needed a second chance. He was a 10-month-old Alaskan malamute with a criminal record as long as my mother’s grocery list. Having been impounded several times for ripping up people’s garbage and treeing cats, he needed a friend and so did I.

I began obedience training Nephi every day. He learned fast, and before long I felt a bond with him through the long hours of hard work. Nephi and I roamed the woods together, chasing rabbits or squirrels or picking berries. My health improved dramatically, but it was not until my work with Nephi that I realized I did not have to let diabetes control me, but I could control my diabetes. I could accomplish my goals.

Since I was 7, I wanted to run the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. Nothing appealed to me like spending two weeks in Alaska mushing a team of huskies over mountains and through rivers for 1,000 miles.

I began to train Nephi to pull. My dad and I put Nephi into a harness and hooked him up to a tire.

At first, Nephi didn’t understand when we called his name and gave him a command that he was supposed to go away from us.

When we sent one of my brothers in front with a sandwich, Nephi figured it out pretty quick and was soon running and pulling me on a three-wheel ATV without any bait in front of him.

It was fun to be pulled around by Nephi, and my dream to run the Iditarod became more real and exciting. After training Nephi, I talked my dad into getting some more dogs. As each new dog arrived I would hook him up behind Nephi and holler, “HIKE!!” The new husky was normally facing backwards when I’d give the command and it would be whipped around so fast when Nephi pulled the lines that the dog’s head would still be spinning when we returned from the run.

But as the new dog realized what he was supposed to do, he was thrilled to be a part of all the excitement.

Within a couple of days the dogs would be yapping and whining when they saw the harness. When hooked up, they would jump six feet into the air, trying to expend some of the adrenaline built up in their system. By the time the snow came that year, I had a four-dog team and a sled.

When we went for a ride together and they were all stretched out in front of the sled, they pulled magnificently.

There is always something magical about having the dogs out in the cold and just letting them run. It’s a feeling of freedom you share with the dogs as they run and breathe in near silence and know something you don’t.

It’s a quiet lesson you learn on your own. There’s not a tall, overbearing teacher cramming facts down your throat about when the Civil War began or that secant=1/cosine. It’s something you learn when you are with the dogs and you have taught them many things. You have taught them how to pull and what some of the words we say mean.

But for all I’ve taught my dogs, I have learned far more from them. I know that through hard work and patience, there is nothing I can’t accomplish, whether it’s handling my diabetes or anything else that happens in life.

I know what unconditional love feels like when Nephi puts his head against me and asks for a hug after I’ve just scolded him for chewing his harness. Fear stands in the way of a lot of things, but my dogs have never feared the unknown.

On the coldest days when the thermometer registers at 20 degrees below zero and most people are inside their houses wrapped in a blanket trying to keep warm, I’ll be outside dreaming. I’ll be running my dogs with the cold air freezing the outer layer of my skin, and there will be tears in my eyes, not because I’m sad, but because I am truly happy sharing the time with my dogs and knowing lessons others will never know.

But there will be tears in my eyes because my nose hairs have frozen together and yanked each other out of their roots again. Ouch.