Fear

There is a bond among parents of kids with diabetes. And it's not even an unspoken one; we generally stand up for one another and worry for each other when our kids face some kind of crisis medical, social, or otherwise. Before I tell this story, let me begin with a little background information about the street where I live. I don't actually live in the street, of course, but you get what I'm saying.

On my block, there are five diabetics that I know of, with only one of them being type 2. The rest are type 1. There's me, Emma, my neighbor, the OTHER neighbor (he's the type 2) and a little boy down the street that just moved in. Josh was playing basketball with my son in our driveway, and he saw Emma's pump. Instead of staring, he knew what it was. So our block is good for drug reps and bad for ice cream trucks.

So the other night at about 9pm, we were in the kitchen when a fire truck went screaming down our block, and then an ambulance, and then another, and then several police cars. Needless to say, my internal redneck couldn't resist the urge to walk outside and see what was going on. I saw the fire truck parked at the end of the block, and then the ambulances all pull in to what appeared to be...Josh's house. I said, to no one in particular, "Oh my God, it's Josh," and quickened my pace to the end of the street. Your mind races with so many thoughts about what can happen to a diabetic kid. Was his glucose too low? Did he injure himself? Did something happen to his parents? And then you revert to that bond that you have with other parents of diabetics. You hope and you pray, even as you walk down the street with tears in your eyes, that everything is ok. It must be Josh, I thought. I knew from my experience as an EMT student that emergency responses to kids tend to be rapid and excessive.

When I reached the end of the block, I was incredibly relieved to see Josh standing at his door looking to see what was going on like the rest of the hicks. I wanted to hug him and kill him at the same time for scaring the crap out of me. Turns out it was his neighbor's father in law, who I also knew on a casual basis. And I was very grateful. Not grateful that something had happened to someone, but that it wasn't Josh. And he's not even my kid. But in a way, they all are.