I used to dream about having lost a two-inch-tall version of one of my kids in backyard grass that had grown taller than usual.

These days I dream about diabetes.

In my most recent diabetes dream, all was well with Will.  I somehow knew that his A1C was 6.8, a fact I sensed without an endo having ordered the blood draw that would’ve told me so.

I knew, with no meter-downloaded data to read, that Will had been testing an average of 8.4 times a day.

He had just, in the dream, happily trooped off to soccer practice with 200 units of insulin in his fresh-batteried pump, a new infusion site, and 25 testing strips in his meter, everything secured in the zipped-up smaller pocket of his backpack.

All this, while his mother ran—hair flying and barefoot for some reason—down our street and around the corner onto the long road that leads to our pharmacy.

I knew, even before I arrived, that once there, I would buy a blood glucose meter and that it would read, when I pricked my own finger:  296.

I woke from the dream in a panicked dread that I myself had somehow been diagnosed and had forgotten.

But the 296 was only a dream.

I settled a non-dream hand on my sweaty upper abdomen where I imagine my pancreas to be.  Unlike my fourteen-year-old son’s, mine seems to be working fine.

Relief was followed quickly by more dread.

I can rise and check Will’s blood glucose levels when I wake from this kind of dream.  I can help him count the carbohydrates in his meals and I can pick him up from school when he himself is 296 and I can make sure that everything he needs for soccer practice is stowed in the zipped-up smaller pocket of his backpack.

But no matter how carefully we convince ourselves and him that we are in this together, it’s my kid’s body, and it’s his disease.