Got home from work, nuked my blackened pork chops and sat down at the table beside Susanne.

"So there's this company in England that has created cell clusters similar to those the body uses to control blood sugar," I tell her before lunging into my pork.

She sips her water and nods.

"Oh?"

"Yeah. Pretty cool. Also, in another study in mice, it seems adult blood could be a richer source of insulin-creating stem cells than fertilized eggs," I continue.

"Uh huh."

"Yep. Hey, I had another idea for our fundraiser , "

That's when she stops me.

"Can we not talk about diabetes anymore tonight?"

Susanne is knee-deep in the trenches every day; desperately pulling down high sugars like helium-filled balloons that refuse to stay grounded. She spends other days saving Charlie from catastrophic lows. Saving our family. Making very difficult decisions. Taking blood from him in the wee hours of the night like a vampire. Getting her hands dirty.

I'm at work all day. I have the time and luxury to search for diabetes research stories on the Internet; to mull things over: to write these very words: to upload and peruse graphs and pie charts of Charlie's blood sugars while sipping chai tea.

She's not getting on the computer. She's lucky if she can pee. She's not examining pie charts or reading about possible cures. She's jotting down blood sugar numbers on syrup-stained napkins with a half-eaten purple crayon. She's wiping asses. She's in the jungle.

It makes me wonder if I'm the out of touch executive coming down from corporate with " big ideas"; giving the over-worked and under-paid department manager useless advice in how to "get more" out of her employees.

"I think you've got a problem," Susanne says.

"It's all you talk about."

There's about two minutes of silence.

A slurp of water.

My knife scraping against the plate.

A deep sigh.

Television static from the living room.

I search for something other than diabetes.

Anything.

Ooh! Got it!

"Hey, you hear about the 13-year-old girl whose feet were severed while on a ride at Six Flags?"

I think I have a problem.