Hovering in the shallow section of the pool, I inched closer to eavesdrop on a conversation between Maeve and Bella, a classmate of Charlie’s.

"Do you have diabetes like Charlie?" Bella asked.

"No," Maeve answered.

"But having diabetes isn’t the worst thing to have," Maeve added quickly.

Bella spun around in the neon-green tube, waiting to face Maeve again.

"Cancer is the worst thing," Bella said.

"Yeah," Maeve said.

"Still, it’s pretty bad (diabetes)," Maeve added, to set the record straight.

"Poor Charlie," Bella said sweetly.

"Yeah," Maeve agreed, nodding her wet, slicked-back head.

Serendipity

At about 5:30 pm that same day, Susanne placed Charlie’s dinner plate in front of him at the table and reached for his pump. She patted him down like an FBI agent does a felon, only to find nothing there.

"Where’s your pump?" she asked Charlie.

"I roh oh," he said, his mouth full of chicken dipped in applesauce.

"Carey? He doesn’t know where his pump is!"

"Did you put it back on when he was done swimming?"

"I thought I …"

"Oh, shhhh-shipbuilding! " (However, I didn’t say shipbuilding).

With my fingers, I counted how many hours Charlie had been detached from the medicine that keeps him alive. Let’s see, we got to the pool at about 1:30 pm. Crap! Detached for four hours. His dinner blood sugar was going to be off the charts high. Damn! What did I do!!!

"He’s 131," Susanne said, cleaning the blood away from his finger with an alcohol wipe.

All part of the plan. Level of activity multiplied by insulin onboard, subtracted by hours detached and divided by water temperature.

Yeah, I pretty much nailed it.