When I see coverage of the famine in Somalia, I just think: whoa, better not go there with Briggs. I picture being in the Cormac McCarthy The Road and how many syringes I’d need to carry, and then that it wouldn’t matter if I filled my entire survival wagon with medicine and needles, it wouldn’t be enough, and anyway people would steal the syringes to make me into a better-tasting ham.

Briggs is still doing fine, if you overlook the dinnertime “No thanks, I’m hungry but I think I’ll just lie here until I die” thing on the living room rug. (He ate farfalle and Nate’s vegan meatballs and broccoli, and lived.) Everyone except target-audience Briggs guzzled a green smoothie which was so sweet with pineapple juice and bananas any kale benefit was surely cancelled out but he did eat the broccoli without comment, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

Insurance papers are staring to come in the mail, retelling the story of the past week point five. They seem to indicate that we owe no one money, but they make it seem possible that none of this is covered. Everything says THIS IS NOT A BILL. Nothing says DON’T WORRY YOU DO NOT OWE ANYONE MONEY. A smart insurance company would stamp those words in corporate red-magenta ink whenever applicable.

More luck: a woman in town befriended me for a mysterious reason about maybe a year ago, acting on a feeling that we have something in common. It turns out her daughter is one year older than Briggs and diabetic. We got together yesterday. She is wonderful–the kind of person who says humans probably shouldn’t drink the milk of other mammals except for in coffee.

She pulled prize after prize out of a shopping bag: a travel-sized sharps container (actually a box of EIGHT travel-sized sharps containers. “I don’t need these!” she said, then demonstrated the sharps-clipper that allows her to separate the needle bits from the bulky plastic bits of syringes); CVS-brand cherry glucose gel to revive a passed-out child (“It came in a three-pack! It tastes gross”); a spare finger pricker set (“Every time you go to a doctor, they give you another one of these. You might as well keep an extra one in your car”). And more riches.

She said she now thinks Type 1 diabetes is the reason she was mysteriously drawn to me. At the end of our meeting I found out her husband is a dog whisperer. Maybe this miracle person will teach me to be a diabetes mother (“we are their pancreas–we inject insulin”) and the husband will work some woo-woo on Butter.