By Kimberly Ford Chisholm

Fiery Ball of Flames

“If the plane crashes and all of us die,” my thirteen-year-old daughter said on the eve of her eighth grade trip to DC, “would they even have a graduation?”

I stared across the taquería table at her.

“Can you imagine,” she just about whispered, “all the funerals?”

I couldn’t.

Because if I had, we wouldn’t have put her on the plane the next morning.

Will, my oldest, her brother, the kid in our family with T1D, had taken the same trip exactly one year before.

For Will, DC was the first time he would travel without Bill and me—not counting glorious weeks at Bearskin Meadow Camp—since his diagnosis two years before.

DC, for Will, was an even bigger deal, an even more significant rite of passage than for many eighth graders.

He had just come out of his T1D honeymoon.

He was growing inches in months and was hitting the adolescent hormones hard.

All of which made for super zany blood glucose numbers.

There was, at one point, the suggestion on the part of the school that I accompany Will.

I love my boy but I really really didn’t want to spend eight days touring Washington with 74 teenagers.

After meetings with the school nurse, the counselor, the leader of Will’s “family group”; after I’d put plenty of emphasis on how much adolescents need independence, Will headed off on his own.

While other parents were encouraged not to contact children making an  important bid for self-sufficiency, we made a plan that involved plenty of texting of BG numbers.

While other parents worried that they wouldn’t hear a word all week, I worried that we would get word that we needed to fly out, now, because Will was 478 and had been for hours and was acidotic and headed to the nearest ER.

Nothing, of course, even remotely dramatic happened.

Because—I was sure—I put back-up meters in every pocket of every bag.  I had triplicate pump supplies with three different people in case one or the other lost their precious cargo.

I had names of doctors in DC and copies of prescriptions and the reassurance of the endocrinology team at Stanford and the teachers at Will’s school and I was, actually, pretty confident that the experience would be an excellent way for Will to become more confident in his ability to manage his disease on his own.

 

Which is why it was so odd when my daughter presented this amorphous, truly catastrophic specter the afternoon before her trip.

There were no medical supplies wedged in the corners of Aidan’s luggage.

The one meeting I had been to was the same meeting all the other parents went to, during which we discussed nothing more frightening than how much spending money to send with your kid.

Eighteen hours before she was due to take off in a 757 with 73 other kids from our community, my daughter was painting the grimmest kind of picture and I realized, burrito stuck in my throat, that I would have an entirely other set of concerns this time around.

And they might be worse!

I would worry that she was unhappy with the roommates that were assigned to her.

I worried she would have the floaty terrible anxiety I have while traveling.

I worried that there would be a monsoon, a Sandy-scaled tornado, an earhtquake that no one had seen coming.

I worried she would be caught up in the girl drama that Will had been immune from because of his gender and that I had a good handle on, given that I checked in with him often, finding out not only that his blood glucose was 178, but that he was then going to try to stuff himself in an elevator with 16 other boys who never seemed to care about who was on the ins or the outs.

 

The difference in my experience of my kids leaving was unexpected.

And uncomfortable.

Was this another T1D silver lining?

Will’s disease meant that I got to focus my concerns.

I got to then DO SOMETHING about eventualities that seemed particularly scary.

I got to keep in closer touch with my son than the daughter who sent two text-photos all week, one of her smiling in front of a cupcake store and the other of herself beside a man in a black uniform with a gigantic automatic-looking weapon slung across his front.

Both kids had good experiences.

Both kids grew up some, in ways I appreciate and encourage and value.

But with the kid who has T1D, as with all things T1D, it felt different.