…“But you won’t be going home this afternoon.”
For a second, I thought she meant detention. Or maybe that they needed to keep me longer to monitor my blood sugar. My brain was still foggy, still thick from the sugar flooding my bloodstream, but even in that haze something felt wrong.
“Why?” I asked.
The woman from CPS pulled a chair over and sat across from me. She didn’t open her folder yet.
She just looked at me in that careful way adults use when they’re about to say something that might break a kid. “Your nurse noticed something unusual with your insulin pump,” she said gently.
I glanced at the device sitting on Nurse Strand’s desk.
It looked normal. The same small screen, the same tubing that ran under my shirt to the infusion site on my stomach. I’d had diabetes since I was eight.
That pump had been part of my life for years.
“What about it?” I asked. Nurse Strand and the CPS worker exchanged a quick look.
Then the nurse turned the pump toward me. “Do you know what your basal rate is supposed to be?” she asked.
I shrugged weakly.
“Not really. My stepmom handles the settings. My doctor tells her what to put in.”
That’s when Nurse Strand pointed to the numbers on the screen.
“They’re almost triple what they should be.”
The words didn’t land right away.
Triple. I blinked at the screen.
“That just means… more insulin, right?” I said. “Yes,” she said quietly.
“But not the kind you needed.”
She reached over and tapped the history log on the pump.
Rows of tiny entries appeared—times, adjustments, numbers. “These changes were made early this morning,” she said. My stomach twisted.
“Yeah,” I said slowly.
“She does that sometimes.”
“She?” the CPS worker asked. “My stepmom,” I said.
“Linda.”
The nurse inhaled slowly, like she was steadying herself. “Have you been feeling sick a lot lately?” she asked.
I thought about it.
The dizziness. The headaches. The days where my blood sugar would swing wildly for no reason.
The nights where Linda would hover over me with this tight little smile and say things like, “Poor thing, you’re so fragile.
Good thing I know how to take care of you.”
“I guess,” I said. The CPS worker finally opened her folder.
Inside were forms. A lot of them.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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