Charlie was diagnosed with diabetes four years ago today.

Charlie never was a good sleeper. So when his twenty-minute naps changed to two-hour naps in the late summer of 2003, we saw it as a godsend. By September and into early October, we had to wake him from naps approaching three hours.

Suddenly he lost interest in eating. Susanne thought he surely had some sort of stomach virus brewing. But he never got sick.

Soon after, his appetite for fluids increased greatly as he voraciously guzzled tall glasses of milk and clawed at the refrigerator for more. It was never enough. This was followed by Charlie often waking up in the middle of the night drenched in urine from neckline to toe. I can remember Susanne constantly changing the sheets in the crib.

In retrospect, maybe we were in denial. Maybe we chalked it up to "just a phase" or that boys are just different. We never had a boy before. We knew the symptoms. Susanne's brother has type 1. My grandfather also had type something. My father has type 2. Diabetes was no stranger.

On Saturday, November 15th, Susanne and I went out to see the movie Mystic River. My mom babysat Maeve and Charlie. When the movie was over, I called home to check on the kids.

"Charlie's drinking a lot," she said, clearly concerned.

"I know," I said damply, as if the verdict was already in.

We were silent for a moment until I said, "you're thinking diabetes?"

"You should have him tested," she said.

Through the concrete walls of the bustling mall and down fifteen miles of highway and flickering traffic lights, into our neighborhood, up our driveway and into our living room, I could see the worry in my mother's eyes.

The next day, Susanne's sister, a nurse, recommended we get test strips from the pharmacy to place in a freshly wet diaper. No matter how many times we did it, the result came back positive. The strip turned as dark as possible. We felt sick.

The on-call pediatrician was blasé. "Just bring him by sometime this week," she said.

Susanne's brother Patrick called soon after. He was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes when he was 18.

"Don't wait," he urged Susanne. "Take Charlie to the ER now!"

I was silent as Susanne scooped Charlie up and left for the hospital while I sat in shock on the edge of the bathtub, bathing Maeve.

"Someday we'll laugh about this," Susanne said to Charlie, laughing, as they approached the hospital in the darkness.

"Someday I'll tell you the story about how I thought you had diabetes but you were just going through a growth spurt."

"It's probably nothing," Susanne told the nurse.

"Did your son drink any cleaning fluids?" the nurse asked after pricking his finger.

"No."

"Well, mom, your gut was right. He has diabetes."

Charlie's blood sugar was 587.

The doctors and nurses praised us for spotting the signs so soon. They told us horror stories of other children near death at diagnosis with blood sugars that doubled that of Charlie's. None of this mattered. He had diabetes. What do we do now? That's all we wanted to know. How can we make him healthy?

When I got to the hospital, Charlie looked tiny, strapped into the large gurney. A splint was fastened to his soft, little arm so that he wouldn't pull the IV out. He clung to us, terrified. By 11:00 pm they got Charlie into an ambulance to transport him to a pediatric hospital one hour away - St. Christopher's in Philadelphia.

I followed closely behind the ambulance as an intermittent rain came down. Coming down in bullets then halting to a sprinkle. Hard again, then soft. It was uncertain. It was surreal staring at the blurry, flashing lights of the ambulance that carried my wife and son. Was this really happening? On the radio, Beth Orton sang "Ooh Child." Her beautiful voice swirled through the car with a sense of gloom as if she herself didn't truly believe that "things are gonna get easier" or "things are gonna get brighter."

We arrived at St. Christopher's at midnight. The crib looked like cage. Charlie's oversized green hospital pajamas drooped to the floor. It was the smallest child size they had. It was late. We were tired. It felt like an alien abduction. We were shaking and waiting for instruction. Everything happened so fast.

There was no time to cry.