Enduring Kindness

My Best Medicine

L.S.

MY son was diagnosed with diabetes two months before his bar mitzvah. I’d noticed he looked different, but wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t until my mother came over on a Thursday for my daughter’s graduation and said, “Why does he look so gaunt?” that it hit me that he’d lost a lot of weight.

During the seudah that Friday night, I saw that he was eating a huge amount and drinking everything in sight. Alarm bells started to go off in my head, but they were faint. On Shabbos morning, I went to check on him, and it immediately struck me how skinny he was. There were three empty bottles of vitamin water on his nightstand that he’d drunk in the middle of the night, and he could barely lift his head off the pillow. As I was going down the stairs, he got up and told me he was starving. When I told him to come down and eat something, he answered that he didn’t think he could make it down the stairs. When I heard him say that, everything fell into place. This time I actually heard the alarms going off in my head!

This wasn’t diabetes, was it?

If so, this was a medical emergency.

I ran to a neighbor who’d recently joined Hatzalah, and he gave me a glucose monitor. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the number 391 as long as I live. After becoming hysterical for a few minutes, I calmed down enough to join my son in the ambulance.

We were taken to a hospital not far from our house. By the time we got there, his glucose level was 440! My son was very quickly diagnosed with diabetes. Because of the high levels of certain chemicals in his blood, we were sent to the pediatric intensive care unit. I remember a doctor coming in, asking me if I had any questions. I was feeling immense despair and replied, “About fifty thousand but I’ll ask them as soon as I can talk without crying.” Getting this diagnosis felt like the most terrible thing that could happen to us.