“As a girl, I knew no diabetics, or really any other kids afflicted with disease. The fictional character of Stacey McGill alleviated the loneliness of being sick.”
Charlotte Gomez / BuzzFeed
The summer of 1991 lingers in my memory as a series of sweaty vignettes, scenes in which a scrawny and sun-burnished version of me ran around a YMCA day camp, crisscrossed with half-assed tan lines and bedecked in neons. Bryan Adams serenaded me with "Everything I Do" in perpetuity, Terminator 2's special effects blew my fucking mind, and I was strapped into a fanny pack for all of it.
The fanny pack was a new accessory that I had adopted for utility, not fashion. It was just a happy coincidence that the fanny pack zeitgeist was in full swing. Rather than slap bracelets or the other traditional trappings of a '90s tween, though, my nylon sherpa carried a blood tester, an ice-pack case containing insulin and syringes, and a roll of Lifesavers. I was a freshly minted juvenile diabetic.
Just weeks before, cotton-mouthed and blinking in and out of consciousness, I had heard an urgent-care doctor say to my mother, "...or it could be diabetes."
Coooool, I remember thinking, like Stacey. She's so cool — before slipping back into the deepest sleep I have ever known.
Anastasia "Stacey" McGill, was the COOLEST babysitter in The Baby-Sitters Club (BSC) canon. Stacey was from NEW YORK CITY. Stacey was BLONDE and had a PERM. She dotted her i's with HEARTS. Stacey was into FASHION. Though my cognizance was flickering like a film strip with missing frames, I understood on that gurney that of all the maladies I could incur, I had been struck with the same disease as STACEY MCGILL, coolest of the babysitters.
Charlotte Gomez / BuzzFeed
I discovered The Baby-Sitters Club series the previous year. Dissimilar to Stacey McGill, my favorite place was the school library. During one fated visit, Logan Likes Mary Anne! (book #10) beckoned me from its pedestal by the entrance. A self-effacing, dorky 10-year-old, I was drawn to the book. On the cover, the titular characters beam at each other over a copper-haired child whose hand is held hostage by a jar (he appears to be lovestruck by Logan too). The cosmos clearly orchestrated this discovery, so dutifully I checked out Logan Likes Mary Anne!, and thereafter was a fervent Baby-Sitters Club disciple.
The Baby-Sitters Club is a small band of middle-school girls (and once in a while the besotted Logan), who are less of a club and more like the controlling mafia caring for the forsaken children of fictional Stoneybrook, Connecticut. The girls meet three times a week in Claudia Kishi's bedroom (because that baller has her own landline) to await calls from parents and generally bro-down (at least as much as hard-ass and autocratic BSC President Kristy Thomas will allow).
Killjoy Kristy is their tomboy dictator, for she is bossy and the BSC was her brainchild; Claudia, the club's benign VP (because private landline), is creative, and at least once per novel something she is wearing is described as "funky"; when Mary Anne Spier isn't making googly eyes over a lodged ankle-biter at Logan, she enjoys the tedious honor of club secretary. She has the best penmanship, but I suspect her role as the gang milquetoast won her the shittiest job; lastly, numeral savant Stacey serves as BSC treasurer.
All of the books in The Baby-Sitters Club series meander in the same way. Each novel focuses on one of the girls and their conflict du jour. After said conflict is introduced, the club's origin story is retold, and the members of the coterie are described ad nauseum. Then the story and the subplots resume until the conflict's conclusion. In addition to the original four girls, the BSC adopts Dawn Schafer, a hippie native of California. Mallory Pike and Jessi Ramsey become junior members (which means they're ELEVEN. What business do 11-year-olds have getting paid to be caregivers to other tiny humans?!). Later on in the series, Abby Steveson joins the BSC and is allergic to everything.
This goes on for 213 novels.
Although I was most similar to Mary-Anne, of all Stoneybrook's young wardens, my admiration for Stacey was the strongest. Her first episodic arc in the Baby-Sitters Club catalog is entitled The Truth About Stacey. Stacey's "truth" is that her parents are mishandling her diagnosis of Type 1 diabetes. In the very first novel, we learn that Stacey recently emigrated from New York City, where she was teased and rejected by her friends after being diagnosed with diabetes. She elects to hide her disease from the BSC sister-wives in Stoneybrook. After they catch her in some lies and misinterpret her abstinence from sweets as anorexia, she confesses that she's a juvenile diabetic.
In The Truth About Stacey, Stacey's parents derail her life by dragging her back to NYC to meet with various doctors in hopes they'll present them with some kind of miracle cure (including holistic medicine!) for the incurable disease. Being schlepped around by her delusional parents to these visits, after her move and diagnosis, causes her to feel alienated and melancholic. I felt sympathy for Stacey, but was unable to relate.
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How Reading "The Baby-Sitters Club" Helped Me Cope With Diabetes