by Kim Chisholm
One fine day last spring I was tearing down a Palo Alto thoroughfare having just dropped fourteen-year-old Will at a soccer try-out.
He was thinking about trying to join a new, more competitive team.
*I* was thinking about how late I was in getting back to my younger kids and how we didn’t have capers for the piccata I wanted to make for dinner and that I was pretty sure we were on the verge of running out of toilet paper.
As these more trivial thoughts waned, though, I found myself descending into the thought I allow myself only VERY infrequently:
How much easier life would be if Will didn’t have type 1 diabetes.
His blood sugar had been 102 on the car ride to the try-out. He needed to scarf down—literally mashing the things two-at-a-time into his teenage mouth—a pair of Airheads taffy-like candy strips.
I had once asked, on the way to a different practice, if it wouldn’t be better to have slow carbs if he was only 102. I liked 102. It pained me to see him bump up his numbers so radically with 30 carbs of pure dextrose.
“Slow carbs aren’t fast enough,” he had said to me back then. “I’m too low this close to practice. I’d crash halfway through warm-ups.” The kid knows his body. And he knows his disease.
Racing down the road on the afternoon of the try-out, I wondered if he was, at this moment, “crashing” even though they would have just begun warm-ups. I wondered if the 30 grams of fast carbs meant he was now 250 and not feeling top notch. I wanted to know the extent to which being too high or too low—he was virtually guaranteed to be the one or the other—was going to affect a try-out that meant a lot to the kid.
I indulged in even darker thoughts.
The coach didn’t know Will at all. He’d never worked with a kid with T1D.
I had just dropped my kid off half-an-hour from home with a group of players who didn’t know anything about his disease, who didn’t know Will well enough to recognize the “speedy talking” that meant he was really low.
As my catastrophic thinking threatened to drop into truly high gear, I slammed my foot on the brake and came to a sudden halt.
Behind a car with a Breakthrough T1D license plate frame.
It was a sign!
I was in such a state that I couldn’t tell if the sign felt positive: there is T1D support everywhere! my kid is fine! he might make this new team and he might love these new kids and his blood glucose might be 128 at this very moment!
Or this might have been a very bad sign: that just as I was dwelling on the ever-present weight of T1D, the words “FIND A CURE FOR TYPE 1 DIABETES” appeared before my eyes, making me feel like that goal was something we would never, ever achieve.
Which was when my attention was drawn by the woman driving the car.
She turned to hand something to the kid in the backseat.
The woman was my friend! The compassionate and calming and intelligent and always positive Heike Fischer!
Now. I have had three conversations with Heike, each under five minutes. But in those five minutes Heike and I had experienced the instant bond of mothers who have weathered those first harrowing days after diagnosis. Heike and I know, without saying a word, that the other understands the exhaustion of long nights when you are hoping your kid will stay asleep even as you make him bleed—so you can be sure he isn’t moving toward the insulin shock that is every T1D parent’s nightmare.
When I realized Heike was driving the car in front of me, that she was—maybe—turning to hand a blood glucose monitor or a tube of Glucotabs to the boy in the backseat, I understood that the sign was, in fact, a positive one.
What I felt was an overwhelming sense of comfort and optimism.
I didn’t have her phone number to call and tell her that I was right behind her and that she just made my afternoon! I wasn’t going to see Heike, maybe for months.
But the fact that a fellow T1D mom happened to stop at a light in front of me right when I was starting to really spin, meant that I could push away all my negativity.
I decided we would get take-out for dinner!
I had the sudden conviction that Will was going to do a great job at the try-out, no matter his numbers.
I remembered that Dr. Buckingham had just begun outpatient trials for the artificial pancreas even for people under 18!
I turned on the radio and found a song that was an old favorite.
By the time the light turned green—Heike having no idea of the transformation she’d produced—my grip on the steering wheel was no longer so tense.
Thanks to Heike and her license plate frame and Breakthrough T1D, my hands were loose and easy and tapping along to the music.
(That’s Will on the right. With two buddies from his new soccer team.)
