And oh yes, Trey has Type I diabetes. “You can’t let it stop you,” the fifth-grader said of his condition. “You’ve got to keep doing what you always do.”

 

The secret: Trey and his family try to approach life one day at a time. They deal with Trey’s diabetes and make sure he’s taking good care of himself, but they don’t worry about the future too much.  “Other than thinking about supplies, I just live in the moment,” says Trey’s mother Tina Caldwell.

 

Trey was diagnosed with diabetes on March 1, 2007. He was a third-grader at Crockett Elementary School in Williamson County when he started feeling a little more tired than usual—and a little thirstier, too. His mother worried he had a urinary tract infection and called the doctor for an appointment.

 

“The pediatrician’s nurse called and said, ‘There’s sugar in his urine.’ And I said, ‘What does that mean?’” Tina remembered. “And she said, ‘We think it could be diabetes, juvenile diabetes. We want to test his blood sugar in the morning to be sure.”’ That caught Tina off guard. She hadn’t thought of diabetes at all. And like any worried parent, she was nervous. She had lost her own mother just a few months earlier, and her emotions were still raw. “Somehow God gave us the strength,” she said.

 

Trey was scared. He didn’t even really understand what diabetes was, and when the doctors left the exam room, he turned to his mother. After the initial shock, he had a lot of questions. Vanderbilt pediatric endocrinologist Jennifer Najjar was reassuring. She calmly told him that she’d have to learn to monitor his blood sugary and take insulin. “She was just amazing, the rapport,” Tina said.

 

Trey and his family went through training at Vanderbilt to learn how to cope with Trey’s diabetes. They learned how to give shots. They learned how to test his blood sugar level. At first, it was overwhelming: four shots a day, and constant data tracking. But they kept going, and they got used to it.

 

Eventually, Trey received an insulin pump, and that simplified the whole routine. Accustomed to giving her son his insulin shots, Tina was nervous about making the switch, but she knew it was important to Trey. Trey really likes having the pump because it gives him a sense of having more control over his situation--and it gives him a little more freedom.

 

And now he’s comfortable fielding questions from his peers at school. They asked a ton of questions when he was first diagnosed—and again later when he received his insulin pump. The Caldwells enlisted the help of the nurse at Trey’s school to prepare a presentation for his classmates about his diabetes, and Trey got to demonstrate how everything works. Now they understand that he had to get used to having diabetes, so he did. “I feel normal, like everyone else,” he said.

 

Maybe even better than “normal.” After all, he’s got his Tour De Cure experience to brag about now. He raised $2,500 for the American Diabetes Association and proved something to himself. Tina still smiles to remember how he hopped off his bike and said, “Mom, I could have done 40 miles!”

 

“He was so proud of himself,” she said. “We are so proud of him.”