Sometimes a 14-Year-Old Just Needs to Be Rescued by His Mom

A parent of a kid with T1D knows better than anyone how quickly even the soundest plans can be derailed.

This spring, my son Will’s seventh grade class went on their annual retreat to Monterey.  The hotel was only about two hours down the California coast.

Our family felt like old pros, having been diagnosed more than a year before.

I reassured his concerned faculty advocate that his numbers had been solid recently!  He’d been on the pump for six months with good success!  I was only a cell-phone call away!

Well, that cell phone rang.

At 9:00 p.m.  Will’s blood glucose was 160.  This sounded a tad high, but all right by me.  I brushed my teeth, settled my eleven- and nine-year-olds into bed and promptly fell asleep.

At 9:55, the phone rang again.

Will was now 210.

He’d checked once more because he and the classmates he was sharing a room with were heading to bed.  He was fifty points higher and presumably rising.  He’d checked in with his advocate down the hall—good boy—and had gotten permission for their room to stay up until 10:30 to be sure that the unit of insulin he had bolused would bring him down the 75 points we expected it would.

It didn’t.

11:45.

The phone.

298.

Will was now sitting out in the hallway, not wanting to keep his roommates up and not wanting to wake his advocate either.  He was starting to feel the flu-like symptoms of high blood sugar.  He was tired and his head ached and he was frustrated that what we—what he—was doing wasn’t, apparently, the right thing.

I sat up in the dark in my room and said into the phone,  “Want me to drive down and grab you?”

If Will’s numbers were over 250 for more than a couple of hours, which they had been, if he had done the pump site change but the numbers weren’t coming down, he and I both were starting to think about how life-threatening diabetic ketoacidosis could be as little as a mere six to eight hours away.

“I am totally happy to drive down and grab you,” I assured him while wondering—with my husband Bill out town for business—if I should wake my younger two and drive them the ten minutes to my parents’ or if I should call my mom and have her come here.

“I really . . . ” he said, then stopped.  “I don’t want to miss out.”

Which became, suddenly, my main concern.  I wanted to drive down and help him bolus more or check the site or bring a new vial of insulin then take a room or stay up reading in the lobby.  I was exhausted and worried and unsure about what to do with my other two kids and how grave Will’s health situation was going to become, but I would do whatever it took so that my middle-schooler wouldn’t miss out on this much-anticipated experience.

Tired and resigned, he said, “I’m just gonna bolus again and see what happens.”

“Sure?”

“Yeah.  I’ll stay up reading in the bathroom.  I’ll call you in an hour or so if my numbers aren’t coming down.”

The poor kid was up until almost three—his classmates and his siblings and his mother asleep—at which point he was 246 and dropping enough to feel like he could go to bed.

Just before ten the next morning, though, the phone rang once more.

The 180 he’d been at breakfast was now 410.

“I think you need to come pick me up.”

On the two-hour drive south (my other kids dropped off at school) I thought about how sad and tired Will sounded, how middle-schoolers really need to feel part of the gang and not different, how he was going to miss sea kayaking with his buddies, the most exciting part of the retreat.

When I arrived at Monterey Kayaks, I found Will standing next to the Head of the Middle School.  I hurried across the parking lot to rescue my kid from what looked not only disappointing, but lonely and awkward and really pretty desperate.

Will, though, surprised me.  He grinned.  He thanked Ms. Brigham for waiting behind with him.  He grabbed his things and said he’d done a second site change and was 280 and could we stop for drive-thru?

Settled in the passenger seat, he sounded calm and pleased.  He answered my first question about the overnight with a story about sixteen kids trying to cram into an elevator, the memory making him grin, the rendition as colorful as I ever get from my eldest child.

It was surprising and heartening.

He just seemed so happy to see me.

Will with cousins and siblings on a less complicated day at the beach.

“I’m sorry you’re not getting to go kayaking with your friends,” I said, seeing if he needed to process anything given that we do, after all, live in Northern California.

He switched the radio from my station to his and said, “That’s all right.  I had a good time last night.”

And my boy turned the volume up.  We drove along the coast with the sun shining, sandy dunes giving way to cliffs and eucalyptus and cypress and palms then dunes again.  We didn’t talk much during those two hours.  But we sang together, loudly, my kid glad his mom had come to rescue him, not seeming disappointed at all to be heading home.