JM#28: What Ordinary People Can Do
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Entry #28 • June 16th, 2026 An Unordinary YearJM#28 has been open on my laptop and sitting empty for over a week and a half. I’ve thought numerous times about sitting down to write but would manage to immediately fill my time with other menial tasks. Quick hits on the to-do list. Send some emails. Run some reports. All the while, sitting right there on my to-do list was “JM#28” just staring me down day after day.
I’ve considered three different storylines to write through, but maybe I need to just start writing. I’ve mentioned before that’s how I journal. I just write my stream of consciousness. And Just Me is really an extension of my journaling. It’s just done at a laptop and shared with others instead of written in a blank-paged journal and tucked away in my bag. I’m still stalling about writing right now 🙈 I know what I need to write about, but it feels overwhelming. One week ago, on Sunday 6/7 (six seveennnnnnn - iykyk), I brought my son with me to my very protected time at Kiln. I don’t bring anyone to that with me. Or rather, it’s rare that someone gets to be a part of that weekly moment. But it wasn’t just any Sunday. Last week marked the one-year anniversary of my son’s diagnosis. One year. We made it. I had a friend ask if it had felt like it’s been years. But I told her no. I’m actually almost more surprised that it’s already been a year. That feels like such a significant amount of time, and yet it feels like it just slipped into a black hole for me. And while it feels like time has slipped away over the past year, so much has happened. New ways of moving through daily life. New friendships formed. New challenges when participating in sports. New fears uncovered that didn’t exist before. New conversations between my son and me. A whole new level of connection and camaraderie through a traumatic experience. Ways I’ve blown things up at work while not functioning at my best, only to be extended grace time and again from my staff as I bumble through it all. And this—Just Me—finally launched in a way I couldn’t quite see before my world crashed down one year ago. Reflecting on it all in this way is making me realize in real time how much I’ve gone through in the last year. Immense change. Immense growth. Tearing down and rebuilding. Loss of innocence. More knowledge gained. Joining a club I never wanted to join. Literally, the lyrics playing right now as I’m typing couldn’t sum up this past year any better: Gonna Have to Trust You by Stephen Stanley
CHORUS
I’ve been to dark places I lost my foundation
I’ll scrape my knees begging for something new
Just hold on tight so I can make it through
There’s nothing else I can do
I guess I’m gonna have to trust You
The hard parts are real, but that’s not what I want to focus on today. Instead, I want to share some of the beautiful things I’ve witnessed over the past year that I haven’t written about yet. Ordinary ActsWhen my son started basketball practice back in August, we were only a couple of months into his diagnosis. Everything was still very, very new as we tried to understand what we were working with—an integral organ that no longer functioned. I needed his basketball coaches to understand this reality and what my son was juggling. Most importantly, I wanted them to know what to watch for and how to respond in an emergency situation involving his blood sugar. While my son knew how to care for himself, if his blood sugar dropped too low, he could reach a point where he could no longer advocate for himself. THAT is what I wanted the coaches to be prepared for. A few weeks into the season, I finally pulled myself together enough to create a one-page handout explaining how to care for my son “in case of emergency.” I will never forget how that conversation went. My son’s coaches are incredible men who have been involved in the homeschool sports league for decades. They had stepped away from coaching for a few years but recently returned, and we are so thankful for them. It’s a three-generation package: Grandpa, Dad, and Son all coaching together. That evening after practice, I walked over to share the handout I’d created. I started by asking if they were familiar with Type 1 Diabetes. All three shook their heads no. So I began explaining everything we had learned. I told them how well my son was doing at advocating for himself. I walked them through what low blood sugar looked like, what to watch for, and what situations would require intervention. Together, we discussed a plan for games and practices. They reminded my son that he had complete freedom to step off the court at any time if he needed to treat his blood sugar. They were engaged, supportive, and fully invested in helping us make sure there was a plan. After fifteen or twenty minutes, one of the older coaches finally spoke up. “Once we heard about your son’s diagnosis a few weeks ago, we started doing our own research.” Then they began telling us about the videos they had watched, the information they had learned, and even a resource they had written down for us to check out later. And I just stood there, stunned. There were so many lessons packed into that moment. Remember how I started the conversation by asking whether they were familiar with Type 1 Diabetes? They shook their heads no and quietly listened as I shared our experience. We are the ones living this reality, after all. They listened to our concerns. They listened to our fears. They listened to what was working. They listened to what wasn’t. What humility. Because I know exactly what my response would have been. I wouldn’t have meant anything negative by it, but I would have immediately said something like, “Actually, yes. Once I heard about your son’s diagnosis, I did a deep dive and learned everything I could.” But they didn’t do that. They let me speak first. They saw value in our lived experience that went beyond the hours of research they had already invested. Only after listening to everything we had to say did they mention that they had already spent weeks learning how to better support my son. I cannot adequately describe what that felt like. It’s one thing to explain this disease to someone. It’s another thing entirely when someone takes it upon themselves to learn about it on their own because they care about your child. I felt unbelievably seen. And a little less alone. They took what I hold most precious and showed me that they, too, would hold it with the utmost care. Grown men. My teenage son. There are so many lessons packed into that interaction. Even now, it gives me chills to think about.
Another tender moment I think back on is a friendship I’ve watched grow over the last year between my son and one of his teammates. This is a boy he had been playing basketball with for a few years before the diagnosis. They were already friends. But it’s been really special to watch that friendship become such an encouragement to my son through this past year. I’ve watched this boy unknowingly shoulder part of the load simply by asking questions. He’s tried to understand what this disease means. He checks in with my son during practices and asks how he’s feeling. Nothing flashy. Nothing profound. Just a genuine willingness to care. I asked my son to specifically share his thoughts on how certain friends have impacted him over the past year, and this is what he shared: “What has really encouraged me while managing my diabetes are the people who want to talk about it or learn more about it, but don’t approach me as if they have some sort of answer or knowledge that I don’t. Instead, I’ve had several friends who have been open-minded and willing to listen without judgment or ignorance. People like that have been incredibly helpful because when you’re carrying a lot on your shoulders, it feels good to have somebody help share the load. There’s no better way for someone to encourage you than simply being willing to listen and care.” And when I think about my own life, two friends immediately come to mind. My friend Hope, whom I wrote about in JM#26. And another friend here locally. My friend Kourtni has reminded me time and time again that I don’t ever have to “get over” this diagnosis. I don’t have to justify the grief. I can complain about it as much as I need to. I can share the frustrations and I can share the victories. Having a friend who can sit in that space with me while I navigate a lot of grief has been such a relief. Whatever situation leads a person into grief, I think it’s common to eventually stop talking about it. Not because the grief is gone, but because there’s this nagging thought: How am I not over this yet? Nobody wants to keep hearing about this. And then you find a friend who says: “No. You don’t have to ever get over it. You can feel it and move through it however you need to. I’m here.” What a gift. As I’ve reflected on this past year, I’ve realized something. The people who have impacted my son and me the most haven’t necessarily done anything extraordinary. His coaches didn’t discover a cure. His friend didn’t solve a problem. My friends didn’t make the grief disappear. They simply showed up. They listened. They learned. They cared. And somehow those seemingly small acts carried enormous weight. Ordinary PeopleWhich brings me to a story I came across recently in a Facebook support group for parents of kids with T1D. I read it and couldn’t stop thinking about it. I wanted to share it with you, but before doing so, I wanted to make sure the storyline was actually true. So I had ChatGPT fact-check it against historical sources and help put it into a more readable format. As I read through it, I couldn’t help but notice a common thread. The story you’re about to read is often remembered because of a groundbreaking medical discovery. But what stood out to me wasn’t just the discovery. It was the people behind it. Ordinary people who saw a problem and refused to walk away from it. Read this and then I’ll meet you on the other side. Before 1921, a diagnosis of Type 1 diabetes in a child was almost always fatal.
Doctors knew the disease had something to do with the pancreas, and researchers around the world had spent decades trying to understand it. But no treatment existed. Families were often left with little more than starvation diets designed to slow the disease and buy a little extra time.
Then, in 1921, a young Canadian physician named Frederick Banting approached J.J.R. Macleod, a professor at the University of Toronto, with an idea.
Banting was not the world’s leading diabetes researcher. In fact, compared to many of the scientists studying the disease at the time, he was relatively unknown. He was a doctor, a veteran of World War I, and a man with a theory he couldn’t stop thinking about.
Macleod saw enough potential to give him laboratory space and assigned a medical student named Charles Best to help with the work.
The road forward was anything but smooth.
Experiments failed. Results were inconsistent. Progress was slow. Yet Banting and Best continued refining their methods, studying how extracts from the pancreas affected diabetes in laboratory dogs.
Their early results were promising, but the extracts were still crude and unreliable.
A biochemist named James Collip later joined the team and helped purify the extract, making it suitable for human use.
In January 1922, a fourteen-year-old boy named Leonard Thompson lay dying from diabetes in Toronto General Hospital.
The team’s first attempt to treat him with insulin showed only limited success. The extract wasn’t pure enough.
So they went back to work.
Twelve days later, after further refinement, Leonard received another injection.
This time, his blood sugar improved dramatically.
The dangerous symptoms of diabetes began to improve.
For the first time, there was evidence that a child dying from Type 1 diabetes could be pulled back from the edge.
The significance of the discovery quickly became clear.
News spread rapidly through hospitals and medical communities. Families who had been preparing for the deaths of their children suddenly had reason to hope.
One of those children was eleven-year-old Elizabeth Hughes. Before insulin became available, she had survived on a near-starvation diet and weighed only 45 pounds. After beginning insulin treatment in 1922, she went on to live into her seventies.
Her story would be repeated thousands of times.
Within a few years, insulin was being produced on a large scale and distributed around the world.
The discovery transformed Type 1 diabetes from a fatal disease into a manageable one.
In 1923, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Frederick Banting and J.J.R. Macleod. Banting believed Charles Best deserved equal recognition and shared his prize money with him. Macleod shared his portion with James Collip.
The four men would forever be linked to one of the most important medical breakthroughs in history.
Later, when patent rights became an issue, Banting, Best, and Collip assigned their rights to the University of Toronto for a symbolic sum of one dollar each. They believed insulin should be available to the people who needed it, not used as a path to personal wealth.
Today, millions of people around the world are alive because of the work that began in that small Toronto laboratory.
And perhaps the most remarkable part of the story is this:
The man who first pushed the idea forward wasn’t the most famous scientist in the world.
He wasn’t the leading expert.
He wasn’t the obvious choice.
He was simply someone who saw a problem that needed solving and refused to walk away from it.
Others brought their expertise alongside his.
Together, they changed the future for millions of people they would never meet.
Sources: The historical information in this section was adapted from the University of Toronto’s Insulin 100 project, Michael Bliss’s The Discovery of Insulin, the Science History Institute, and the American Diabetes Association.
That story really chokes me up. What you don’t see in the timeline above are all the children who died while researchers searched for an answer. All the parents who buried their children before help arrived. All the families who simply ran out of time. Meanwhile, a handful of people kept going. They kept experimenting. They kept failing. They kept refining. They kept searching. And eventually they changed the future for millions of people they would never meet, including my son. I think that’s what has struck me so deeply as I’ve reflected on this past year. The coaches who researched Type 1 Diabetes because they wanted to better care for one of their players. A teenage boy who asks questions and checks in on his friend. A friend who keeps showing up and making room for grief. And if I’m being thorough, I’d be remiss not to mention many of you reading this right now. Over the past year, some of you have sent handwritten notes. Some have replied to a Just Me entry. Some have dropped off flowers, sent a text message, given a gift card, stopped by the store, or simply let me know you were praying for us. Most of those things probably felt small to you. They didn’t feel small to me. They were ordinary acts of kindness that arrived exactly when they were needed. None of these people set out to change the world. Just like the people in the story above, they simply saw a need and responded to it. None of them discovered insulin. None of them won a Nobel Prize. None of them will likely have history books written about them. And yet every single one of them changed the trajectory of someone’s life. Including mine. It’s easy to assume that impact belongs to the extraordinary: the brilliant, the influential, or the famous. But over and over again, I find myself seeing something different. I see ordinary people paying attention. Ordinary people caring. Ordinary people choosing not to look away. And those ordinary acts often end up carrying extraordinary weight. One year ago, my son’s world changed forever. As I look back on that year, I’m overwhelmed by how many ordinary people helped carry us through it. What a gift they have been. From one ordinary person to another, -Just Me[gan]
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