My niece, Sadie, is three and a half, which is a thrilling time in terms of language and development. Unfortunately, since her birth overlapped with my becoming the sickest I’ve ever been, I’ve been interested to see how she processes my illness.
She’s always understood that I was sick, and when she was younger she would kiss my boo boos. At 2 years old, she started mimicking testing my blood sugar with her dolls, and she’s ask me to check her too. She’d even make beeping noises like the glucose meter does when it’s done processing the sample.
Now that she’s a big kid, she understands what it means when I’m in the hospital. When I was inpatient at rehab last summer, she decorated my room with luau girls and printed heart duct tape. It was over 8 months ago but Sadie still brings up “that time you were in the hospital for a long long time and we played Doctor!” She had her own doctor kit and scrubs in my hospital room.
Doctor has always been her favorite game to play. Her stories about how her dolls got hurt or why her imaginary friend, Baby, got hurt, are hilarious. “Baby’s in the hospital because he hurt her head when we were apple picking and a cherry fell on him head and there was blood!”
This is a gif of her pretending to give her baby sister insulin in the tummy because “that’s where Auntie gives her medicine!”
She is so funny and smart and while I wish she didn’t have to know so much about illness, I’m confident we are talking about it in appropriate ways and I’m glad she is expressing her feelings about it through play.
The human mind is quite the trip.













