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The diabetes bag is relatively light but it weighs heavy upon us. We panic when we lose sight of it like it's one of our children lost in a food store. It is soft and black with pictures of rockets on it. It contains about 13 alcohol wipes, a meter with a blurry screen, two vials of test strips, a white pricker with a tiny burgundy blood stain on the tip, about a dozen light-blue lancets, a tube of cake gel, Glucagon, two 15-carb apple juice boxes, a granola bar, a bag of Goldfish crackers and a pair of my black underwear???
Ben Patrick Potash!!!!!!!!!
I had gotten the time for "open skate" wrong (shocker), but we raced to the skating rink anyway, knowing that by the time we got there and got our skates on, we would maybe only have about thirty minutes on the ice. Me and my confounded promises to my children.
We got there, made a mad dash from the car into the rink, slapped on our skates in record time and hit the ice, nodding OK to several people who informed us there was not much time left.
We had a solid thirty-seven minutes and amazingly, the whole rink to ourselves minus three or four teenage girls giggling along the boards. A clean white sheet of ice and a welcome coldness in the air on an unseasonably hot Spring day. It was perfect. Hmm. Hands feeling unusually loose and free however.
Where the hell is Charlie's diabetes bag?
Still in the car? By the snack bar? On the bench where we put on skates? Did I even bring it at all? Still at home in the kitchen? In the Sahara Desert? Are delinquents rummaging through it as we speak? I have no friggin' idea!
The clock is ticking. Twenty minutes until we're ushered off the ice. I think about what will happen if Charlie says, as he does so often, "I think I'm low." I picture myself running spastically on the skates through the building and then onto the asphalt of the parking lot with my arms pumping like a freakish maniac. "Crazy Man Loses Bag, Ice Skates on Street" the local papers would report, with an embarrassing photo of me frantically trying to glide on gravel.
Weighing the potential for disaster vs. the precious few minutes we have left to skate, I opt to do nothing. I swoop in silently from behind, circle Charlie with X-ray vision and hope for the best. I notice that his triple axel appears sluggish and I assess his toe loops to be sloppy at best. A sign that he was low? Perhaps.
After leaving the ice, I find the diabetes bag lying alone on a bench near the skate rentals and send Charlie to the penalty box for two minutes for having diabetes.
