It's 3:14 am. Do you know what your child's blood sugar is?

I do. It's 377.

I wake up Susanne, and tell her we've got a problem. I fetch the insulin and a needle and rest my wobbly head in my hands while she flicks a stubborn air bubble. I climb halfway up the bunk bed and jab Charlie in the back of the arm. He wakes briefly and swats at his arm as if just bitten by a mosquito.

It's one of those moments where diabetes shows you just how powerful it can be. A correction of a blood sugar of 289 at 1 am does nothing. Instead his blood sugar soars angrily to 377. It's something bigger than us and bigger than our seemingly paltry man-made insulin.

As Police Chief Brody would say, "we're gonna need a bigger boat."

When you're cutting a plastic water bottle with a scissor with eyes half-open at 3:30 in the morning because you have no plastic cups for your kid to pee in, you gain a particular and unique perspective on the state of your life. This disease really f-ing sucks.

Back in bed with eyes staring at the ceiling, my heart does the same thing it always does when he's this high. It palpitates as if on an amphetamine high.

Susanne is also staring at the ceiling - at faded glow-in-the-dark stickers of planets and shooting stars - still there from when our daughter occupied the room.

"I hate diabetes," she says.

The next day was supposed to be a fun day; Just me and Charlie. Again, we found ourselves battling whatever it was that we were immersed in. We increased and increased and increased temporary basals. We corrected and corrected and corrected. I dropped internal F-bomb after internal F-bomb.

Until finally ...

The tide changed.

And diabetes showed us some mercy.