I have a confession to make.
Last week I wrote about driving down to Monterey to pick up Will, my now fourteen-year-old, from his seventh-grade retreat because his blood glucose levels were dangerously high.
I didn’t write about the five minutes after I’d gotten his call when I raced around the house grabbing my coffee, a sweatshirt to throw over my worn and sweaty exercise clothes, and the new Decemberists CD I’d been wanting to listen to that just happened to be sitting on the kitchen counter.
I got into the car and the first song had the deeply affecting kind of acoustic guitar opening that meant I was suddenly crying. I was suddenly crying hard. Because I was rushing to get my kid and he was in trouble.
Despite the tears and the snot I was having to wipe on the sleeve of the sweatshirt—my twelve-year-old daughter’s, oops—and the fact that I wasn’t sure I’d be able to speak all that clearly, I called my friend Sarah.
Sarah is the woman I’d met only briefly before Will’s diagnosis, but who has been a big part of our lives. The first morning in the hospital she cast me a lifeline in the form of a voice message that was the first of many supportive and insightful conversations. Sarah is empathetic and smart and generous, and Sarah’s daughter has had T1D for 14 years.
Sarah and I . . . ICESKATING!!
“Oh, no!” she said when she heard my strangled voice.
Sarah always picks up when I phone, given the decent chance that a call from a fellow mom of a kid with T1D can mean a tough situation is at hand.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “Tell me what’s going on.”
Through tears I told Sarah I was fine. I told her I was sad, though, and angry because my boy was going to have to miss a meaningful event and because he had a disease that was complicated and unrelenting.
I told her I needed a good cry before I got Will in the car.
I needed a good cry, but also enough time so that when I arrived my eyes didn’t look red and puffy behind the sunglasses I planned to keep on. My voice needed to return to normal and my nose could not be so crazy stuffy.
I needed a good cry, but I also needed to be absolutely sure that Will knew that I was capable and resilient. He needed to believe that the burden of his disease was something I could handle and that it was in no way his fault.
Sarah—because she is wise—told me what readers of last week’s post already know and what I now know but that I didn’t know then:
“I’m sure he’s just done. He’s fine but he will be so glad to see you because I’ll bet he’s just done.”
While I cried, Sarah told me I was doing the right thing. She reminded me about how lucky she and I both feel to have the kind of flexibility and resources that mean we are able to come to a kid’s rescue in a situation like this. She reminded me that he’d gotten to stay the night and that was probably really fun and that there would be other retreats. Sarah chuckled and said it was always completely freezing on the ocean when the seventh graders go kayaking and for sure no one was having any fun at all.
She asked did I felt better and was I okay. My voice finally close to normal, I assured her that I did and that I was. And I told her how thankful I was to have her in my life.
When I ended the call and went back to my music, I felt shored up. Even though the entire album was just as moving as the first song, I didn’t cry for the rest of the drive down.
Not until later that evening—not until after my uplifting drive back up the coast with Will and not until Will’s numbers had come down—did I first really think of something Sarah had mentioned almost off-handedly before we’d hung up. In the list of reasons why she was sure that both Will and I would be fine, Sarah had said, “It’s not like you’re going down to get him in the hospital.”
I just hadn’t been able–while driving down the coast to where my kid’s numbers had been in the four-hundreds for long enough that he might have begun to develop dangerous ketoacidosis—to think about any scenario involving a hospital.
Not that thoughts of the hospital are ever all that far from my mind.
Because of T1D, and the fact that Will is on an insulin pump without any long-acting insulin on board, our son is always six to eight hours from what could be a life-threatening situation.
When Sarah said that I should be thankful that I wasn’t racing toward a hospital, she was speaking from experience. Nearly everyone I know who has a child who has had a child with T1D for any length of time has spent their share of hours in the Emergency Room.
Our family was lucky that day. For many reasons. The day felt hard and long and there were tears and I hated having to pick Will up from an event that might have become one of his best middle-school memories. But there were no ambulances involved and I didn’t have to race to the ER and my friend Sarah and I are closer for that phone call and Will and I had a good time driving back up the coast.
What’s terrible is thinking that such a bad day needs to be qualified as lucky.
No family, no kid, no adult should have to live with the thought that avoiding a life-threatening medical crisis on any given day makes that day a good one.
