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"Still too much sugar! Send more!" If a teacher at school would not let me go to the bathroom, I wet myself in my chair and used facial tissues from the teacher's desk to clean up the mess. I was constantly running to the bathroom. At night, I began wetting the bed. My mother told me not to drink so much water, and took away the glass I kept next to the bathroom sink.

"I told you that you couldn't drink water, when you needed it so bad" my mother said.

"Don't worry Mommy," I told her, "I drank. I had to. When you thought I was washing my hands, I cupped them under the faucet and drank that way. I was so thirsty. I couldn't help it."

It was shortly after my diagnosis, and she was still reeling. I was trying to make her feel better, and willing to risk getting in trouble for drinking water when I'd been told it wasn't allowed.

"Are you mad at me?" I whispered. Even if it meant I might be punished, I wanted her to stop looking like the weight of the world was bearing down on her.

"Of course not," she said, but she looked like she wanted to cry.

One morning in late October she told me I had an appointment with our family physician, Dr. Blackwell. She had called and told him what was going on with me, and he said he needed to take a look at me. When we got to his office, he tested took the Mason jar of my urine that my mother handed him and told her that the results were "not normal." He said he needed to take some blood.

"It may be diabetes," he said as he walked out of the room with the blood sample.

"Oh, I hope not," my mother said.

"What's diabetes?" I asked. I had never heard of it.

"I don't think you have it," she said, "It doesn't run in our family. It's a disease where you have to take shots every day, and you aren't allowed eat any sugar. There's no cure for it."

"No sugar at all?"

"Not at all. That's what I hear, at least."

I frowned. Shots? Every day? No sugar at all? No cure? I wasn't worried. I was a good kid, I figured, and God would not let something like that happened to me. What she had described was my personal 8-year-old version of hell, and only bad people went to hell.

Boy, was I ever in for a theological revelation.

After awhile, the nurse told us that Dr. Blackwell wanted to talk to us in his office. The medical practice was in a spacious, converted 2 story house, and his office was in what was once the formal living room. He sat behind a big desk like a corporate CEO, and my mother sat in the chair across from him. As old as I was, I climbed onto her lap.

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