Susan Fell Evans - Author

Susan Fell Evans has been writing books since second grade.  The first one she remembers finishing was about a flying horse.  Further details about that story are, sadly, lost, as Susan decided the book was terrible and threw it out when she was ten.  Since then, Susan has been a Rotary Exchange student to Sweden, has graduated from college and law school, and has worked at various jobs, including as a science writer, a farm magazine editor, a paralegal, and a trademark attorney.  She currently lives with her daughter, three dogs, three cats and two horses outside of Philadelphia, PA, where she spends her free time writing more books.

NOT EVEN A CAT (To Hold On To)

Book One in the Frankie Series

What do you do when your life is such a minefield that no matter where you step, something is sure to blow up?  Keep seeing the forbidden boyfriend, of course, and keep lying, about everything to everyone.  No problem, right?

Digital Release December 25, 2013

Print Release: January 2014

I WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU

Book Two in the Frankie Series

When love just won’t let you go …

It’s wrong on too many levels to count, but Frankie can’t help herself – she needs to see ex-boyfriend Kyle one more time.  Just to talk, just to find out why he did what he did.  How can that hurt?  As it turns out -- after Kyle gets angry and Frankie’s brothers find out – it can hurt a lot.  

Matt decides to send Frankie to boarding school.  Amanda moves in with Matt and seems intent on moving Frankie out.  Eric and Matt stop talking to each other.  And, as the long-awaited end of life as Frankie knows it is coming fast, Kyle reappears.  Late one night.  When Frankie is home alone.

I Will Always Love You is a tale of love that won’t let go, and one girl’s search for who she is.

Coming Soon.   

Abuse is a big, but not much talked about, problem in teenage relationships.  Estimates vary, but I’ve seen anywhere from 1 in 3 to 1 in 11 kids have been in an abusive relationship or know someone who has.  An abusive relationship is hurtful and potentially dangerous.  No one deserves to be in one, and no one should put up with one.

Abuse happens to people of all ages, to both sexes, and it takes many forms.  I’m not an expert on it, and I don’t pretend to be.  Thankfully, I don’t have personal experience with it, either; it just struck me as a topic I wanted to explore when I was first planning to write a book about Frankie and her brothers.

I learned a lot about abuse while I was doing research for Not Even a Cat and the second book in the Frankie series.  Most important: abuse is not about sex, or about love, or about just losing one’s temper.  Abuse is about control.  Specifically, abuse is about controlling another person.  The control happens in many ways.  Abusers typically start by isolating their victims from family and friends.  They convince their victims that they are worthless, that any “punishment” is deserved, and that the victim has nowhere else to go.  Abuse can be physical, verbal, or both.

If you are being abused, or you know someone who is, please get help.  Many states, cities and counties have organizations that help people dealing with abuse. You can find many of them on the internet.  A national website with some good information on the issue is The Hotline (www.thehotline.org).  

As Frankie’s fans may have already figured out, I am a Type 1 diabetic.  I’ve been diabetic for a long time, and mostly, it’s not something I think about a lot.  It’s just part of what I am, and taking care of it – the blood sugar testing, the insulin taking, all the other stuff – is just one part of the many things I do each day.  Sort of, you know, like remembering to brush your teeth before you go to bed, or being sure to put on your shoes when you go outside.  Only more serious.  Which, like Frankie, I try not to think a lot about.

Frankie Ryan’s Guide to Diabetes: Everything You Never Wanted to Know, and More

Here’s the deal, in as short a form as I can make it, on diabetes.  Because I’m just so sure you were wondering.  I mean, isn’t everyone?  So: enough so you can understand what a pain in the you-know-what it is but, hopefully, not so much you’ll gag.

Start with the fact that when most of what you eat is digested, it gets turned into sugar because that’s the way your cells need it for food.  Once everything is sugar, the sugar goes into your bloodstream.  From there it gets sent to all the cells in your body, so that they can use the sugar to do all the stuff they do.  However — and here’s the catch, because you knew there was one somewhere — the cells also need stuff called insulin to actually get the sugar inside them.  

People who don’t have diabetes make all the insulin they need in their pancreas, one of the organs in your body.  But when you have the kind of diabetes that I have (they call it Type 1, and there is also a Type 2, which is different, just in case you care for some reason), you don’t make any insulin.  The reason is that, for some reason no one knows yet, your body decides that the part of the pancreas that makes insulin is bad, like a virus, and kills it.  Yes, that’s what I said: kills it.  Not even remotely close to nice, and pretty sucky besides.

And then, since you don’t have any insulin, the sugar can’t get into your cells, and it keeps on floating around in your blood instead, and getting to be more and more until it’s sort of like syrup trying to move around in there, which you just know can’t be good, and it causes all kinds of problems that you never want to have.  Which I will not go into, thank you very much.

If you don’t want to have those problems and you do want to live, because — of course — you need sugar in your cells to live, you have to take insulin somehow.  The somehow is with shots, because it turns out that you can’t take insulin as pills (something about the stomach making it ineffective which isn’t really important except for the point which is: NO pills).  And since you need insulin every time you eat, and sometimes when you don’t (just to keep things moving along the way they should), that can be a lot of shots.  Every single day and forever.  Because you know there are no vacations from diabetes.  When I started, I took four shots every day, and some people take even more.  Now I use something called an insulin pump, which means I only have to stick a needle in myself every couple of days instead of several times every day.  (Let’s not even discuss how sad it is that I can be happy about any needles at all.)  The needle I use now actually puts a tiny little plastic tube under my skin, which I then tape down so it will stay put for a few days, and the insulin is pumped into my body through the tube.  Cool.  Almost.

The pump itself is a kind of computer and it’s pretty small, about the size of my cell phone, but you have to wear it all the time because it is always giving you some insulin.  I mean, all the time, even when you sleep.  You’re only supposed to take it off when you shower or go swimming.  It’s connected to you by a long plastic tube, and it has to stay on you somewhere, like in a pocket or attached to a belt.  You program it to give you some insulin twenty-four hours a day.  Some times of the day you want more, like in the afternoon after you’ve had lunch, and other times, like when you’re sleeping, you don’t want so much.  Whenever you eat, you program it to give you some extra insulin to take care of the food, which is called a bolus.  Nowadays the pump actually figures out a lot of that for you, which is good, but ou still have to pay attention and correct it sometimes.

You also have to do a lot of work to figure out how much insulin to take as a bolus, because it depends on how much food you are eating and how many carbohydrates are in the food.  You get really good at math, because basically you have to do math calculations every time you want to put food in your mouth.  And even with that, you also have to check your blood sugar all of the time, because you are always trying to keep it from getting too high or too low, something people without diabetes just do without even trying.  And neither of those things is good; they do things like make you shaky and sweaty and confused, and both can even kill you, so, you know.  Not what you want to do.  

The trouble is, when you are diabetic, a zillion and six things can make your blood sugar be wrong: eating too much, or not eating enough, or eating the wrong thing, or taking your insulin at the wrong time, or taking too much insulin, or taking too little insulin, or exercising, or sleeping, or getting your period, or getting close to getting your period, or being worried about a test, or — well, you probably get the picture.  Which is that just about everything can mess it up.  

Which is also why you have to check it a lot.  In the past, that meant sticking your finger with a sharp needle-like thing to get some blood to put on a little stick that goes into a device called a meter which then shows you a number.  And sticking the finger hurts, almost more than taking a shot does, and you always feel like you are taking a school test and, more often that you want, not passing it.  And then, depending on what the number on the meter is, you might have to take some insulin or eat something.  Now I have something called a continuous glucose monitor (GCM) which checks blood sugar every five minutes and shows the number on the pump, so I don’t need the finger sticking anymore.  So better, but even so.  It’s still a test and the numbers still count.

Oh, and the last thing you might want to know is that there is also a test called the A1C (don’t ask me what is up with the name, because I have no idea), which, of course, requires more blood that you get drawn at the doctor’s office, and which tells you how well you’ve been doing for the last two or three months with blood sugars.  And they make you get that one three or four times a year.  At least.  And, of course, it also gives them another opportunity to yell at you if it’s not good.

There’s lots more I could tell you about diabetes, but I won’t.  If you want to know more about it, do an Internet search or something.  Because I’m pretty sure this is enough for me.