Ring It In CWD Style

The CWD Family Support Weekend runs through the new year holiday.  Many of these families have been spending the new year holiday together for a number of years.  The kids and teens are all about bringing in the next 365 days with the CWD friends they have grown up with.

The Hitchcock family invited everyone to hang out in their room for the evening, and it was a lot of fun.   There were people coming and going most of the night – the smart ones retiring early (we did have to work the next day), and the rest of us staying up well past our bedtime to watch the ball drop.

At about 11:50 the CWD Teens crashed the room.  All of a sudden there was a parade of fifteen or twenty teens and tweens streaming in through the door and filling the room up with teenage noise.   Screeching, yelling, clapping, laughter and giggles.  It was NUTS!

Then someone passed out noisemakers…

I’ve heard people on television talk about how loud the Metrodome football stadium can get during a Vikings home game.  In fact, it has been said it’s the loudest venue in the NFL.

The Metrodome had nothing on the Hitchcock suite that night.

At 11:59:11 PM, one of the teens started counting down, 49! 48! 47! As she got closer, more of them joined in. 46! 45! 44!

The noise and chaos kept swelling, and at one point I leaned over to Andrea Hulke and said “this is the most obnoxious … and totally AWESOME thing ever!!!”

When the ball hit the bottom, and the new year rolled in, I thought the windows of the room were going to be blasted out by the noisemakers and screaming.

It was so cool.

At 12:01 AM, 1/1/11, Jeff kicked everyone out, just like he promised.  As I walked back to my room I couldn’t help but to miss my family terribly.  But I also thought about how these kids, these families that come to the CWD events, they have something special together.  They have something that would have changed the way we all grew up with diabetes if it had been around back then.  It helps them deal with the mental aspect of living with diabetes on the most basic level.

They know they are not alone with it, and they have friends to reach out to when they need it.

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Scott K. Johnson

Patient voice, speaker, writer, and advocate. Living life with diabetes and telling my story. All opinions expressed are my own and do not necessarily represent the position of my employer.

Diagnosed in April of 1980, I recognize the incredible mental struggle of living with diabetes. Read more…