If You'd Do It Without Diabetes, You Can Do It With Diabetes

My husband wrote the T1D travel guide I wish we'd had three months after Felix's diagnosis

If no one in your family has Type 1 diabetes, forward this to a friend who does.

They say a photo is worth a 1000 words. This one certainly is. It’s Nicholas and Felix, bent over each other on a trail in the Swiss Alps — Nicholas giving Felix a basal insulin injection with the Eiger in the background. Felix was seven years old. We were three months out from his Type 1 diabetes diagnosis and somehow, improbably, we were in Switzerland.

We almost didn’t go. Felix was diagnosed on April 18, 2022, and we had already booked a three-week trip through Northern Italy, Switzerland, and France for that July. The flights were paid for. The hotels were reserved. As you’ll hear in our conversation with Stacey Simms on her podcast Diabetes Connection, we considered not going.

What got us on that plane is a philosophy we’ve followed ever since: If you’d do it without diabetes, you can do it with diabetes.

So, we decided to go and Nicholas took the lead on diabetes prep. He researched. He planned. He made lists and backup plans and backups to the backup plans. He has done that before every trip we’ve taken since — New York, Paris, Tokyo, London, Yellowstone, Yosemite — and somewhere in all of that, he accumulated a body of knowledge.

So he wrote it down.

Lessons Learned in Travelling with Diabetes is a 28-page guide covering everything from how to pick a destination when you’re still finding your footing with a new diagnosis, to what to pack and how much, to navigating airport security with a CGM and a cooler full of insulin. It’s practical in the way that only real experience makes you practical — the kind of guide that mentions checking the expiration date on your backup Lantus because we had a close call before our trip to Japan, or that reminds you the WiFi on the plane is going to fail at exactly the wrong moment.

If you are managing Type 1 diabetes yourself, or raising a child who is, and you have ever felt the particular anxiety of trying to map a vacation onto all the invisible labor of keeping someone’s pancreas running — this guide is for you.

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