To study up for this post recognizing American Diabetes Month, I reread The Truth About Stacey and Stacey’s Emergency, and I realized something... It might be time for me to reread the entire Baby-Sitters Club series! You know how with time and distance you forget how great a book or author is? Well, I tore into Raina Telgemeier’s BSC graphic novels as soon as they were each published several years ago (and I adore them), but going back to Ann M. Martin’s prose for Stacey’s Emergency was an emotional reading experience! I had a few of those laugh and cry moments, such as when Claudia, and the rest of the BSC took the train up to visit Stacey in the hospital (two days in a row). During their first visit, I went from laughing at Kristy mocking the uncomfortable chairs in Stacey’s hospital room to tearing up when the girls were rushed out of the room by doctors and nurses sweeping in to tend to Stacey.
Ann M. Martin goes into incredible detail showing not only the experience of living with Type 1 diabetes, but also what it is like to be a child of divorce caught between two parents, and she intersperses medical explanations of how diabetes works with casual funny asides from Stacey that keep the tone from getting too dreary. Yet this is a serious topic, and she doesn’t shy away from getting her main character in trouble. The majority of Stacey's Emergency takes place in a hospital in New York City, with occasional dips into what is going on in Stoneybrook through the experiences that the rest of the club has babysitting Charlotte Johanssen. Since her favorite babysitter Stacey is sick, Charlotte is sick, and she puts her sitters through their paces, as they humor her self-diagnosed Lyme disease, headaches, pinched nerves, and other sicknesses until Stacey gets better. We know Stacey is going to be alright, but as the reader you can’t help but feel the sense of urgency that emerges every few pages. I’ve got to say it, as I was both impressed and satisfied when I read the last page and closed this book – the BSC stands up over time.
Not having personally experienced diabetes, Stacey’s story is a way of walking a mile in someone else’s shoes for me, but it is realistic fiction for 30 million children and adults in the United States. In fact, doing some background reading last week, I found an inspirational blog post on the website Diabetes Mine, “Stacey McGill, A Girl’s First Friend with Diabetes”, where author AlysonN comments on Stacey’s Emergency, saying, “I think this is a great example of how life can make diabetes so difficult to deal with, but that we have to keep pressing on.” In another cool blog post, on Six Until Me, author Kerri talks about reading The Truth About Stacey in the 1980s, stating, “Stacey was awesome because, at the time, my friends were reading The Baby-Sitters Club and it made my diabetes seem mainstream and almost cool.” Finally, I discovered a heart-warming forum thread discussing Stacey on the site Type One Nation, where one contributor explains that she recognized the symptoms of diabetes in her own daughter because “they reminded me of a character in the BSC books that I read all the time".
Like the above personal accounts, a recent study shows that reading fiction helps to develop empathy, and Stacey McGill is one of the most well-known characters in children’s literature that communicates the juvenile diabetes experience. If you are looking for more fiction that shows what it is like to live with this disease, investigate some of the following titles:
- Between a Rock and a Hard Place, by Alden R. Carter
- Even Superheroes Get Diabetes, by Sue Ganz-Schmitt and Micah Chambers-Goldberg
- Interference and Roughing, both by Lorna Schultz Nicholson
- Last Dance, by Lurlene McDaniel
- Living with a Secret, by Deborah Kent
- Needles, by Andie Dominick
- The Summer I Found You, by Jolene Perry
- Sweetblood, by Pete Hautman
- There Will Come a Time, by Carrie Arcos
Is there another popular book protagonist with diabetes that you know of? Did Stacey’s story have an impact on you when you were growing up? Let us know in the comment section!
