The Insulin Box Grandma Drove to School

“Mrs. Lindgren, he’s been skipping his lunch shot to make his last pen last,” the nurse said, and I sat down hard on a kitchen chair with one arm still in my coat.

It was 10:40 on a Tuesday morning in February. I know because the clock on my stove runs four minutes fast and I remember doing the subtraction while she talked, the way your mind grabs at small things when the big thing is too big to hold.

“This is Mrs. Halvorson, the nurse at the middle school,” she had started out. “You’re listed as the third contact for Mason. I couldn’t reach his mother, and his father’s number goes to voicemail.”

His father is my son, Jared. That February he was on a drilling rig outside Williston, North Dakota, about four hundred miles west of us, three weeks on and one week home. Out on location the phones only worked in the man camp at night, and barely then.

His mother is Krista. She worked days at the big parts warehouse on the edge of Thief River Falls, picking orders off the shelves, and they make the floor people keep their phones in a locker until break. I knew that. I had called her a hundred times and waited for the 3:15 callback.

“Is he all right?” I asked. “Just tell me first if he’s all right.”

“He’s all right,” Mrs. Halvorson said. “He’s sitting right here on my cot. His sugar was 342 when he came in this morning, and he had small ketones. I gave him what he had left, which wasn’t much. I’m not calling an ambulance. But I need someone to understand what’s been going on.”

Then she told me what had been going on, and I listened with my keys still in my hand.

Mason is twelve. He was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes the summer he was seven, after a week of drinking water like a horse and wetting the bed for the first time since he was three. I was the one who drove him to the emergency room in Thief River that night because Jared was on a rig then too.

He wears a little sensor on the back of his arm that reads his sugar and sends it to his phone. He takes a long-acting shot at bedtime and a fast one with every meal, out of pens that look like fat markers. A box of five pens lasts him most of a month if nothing goes wrong.

“He came in to see me three times last week with high numbers,” Mrs. Halvorson said. “This morning I asked him straight out, and he finally told me. He’s been skipping his lunch dose and cutting back his bedtime one. He said there’s one pen left at home and his mom said the new box would come Friday.”

“Which Friday?” I said.

“That’s what I asked him,” she said quietly. “He said, ‘The Fridays keep moving.'”

I want to tell this honestly, so I will tell you what I felt in that minute, and it was not kindness. It was a cold, clear anger I had not felt since the day I found out a man on my old mail route was kicking his dog. I sat there with my coat half on and I was angry at my son’s wife.

Because every month for a year, I had sent Krista two hundred dollars for that insulin.