I do a lot of what I like to call catastrophic thinking.

If I have an ache in my knee I’m sure I’ll be calling the orthopedic surgeon by week’s end.

If one of my kids coughs, I’m practically packing the bag we’ll need for the emergency room at midnight.

Type 1 diabetes has had an interesting effect on my doomsday ruminations.

On the one hand, we have—as a family—proven that when the diagnosis you don’t want becomes reality, you might handle it better than you thought.

On the other hand, a chronic medical life-threatening condition can set the most stolid of us spinning.

Take, for example, spring break last year.

We splurged on a week for our family of five in Hawaii.

Will had been pumping insulin for about six months.  When I packed for the trip—never an easy task with T1D—I brought infusion sites and tubing and IV prep for easily a month.  I brought extra meters and test strips and Humalog and Lantus.  I brought back up syringes in case of the pump breakage that I was sure would occur.

Will’s pump was fine.

What didn’t work as well were the infusion sites.

At home in Northern California, we spend plenty of time in the ocean.  But—given the 50-degree water—we won’t dip so much as a toe without a wetsuit.

Turns out that an infusion site stays in place a whole lot better under a wetsuit than exposed directly to salt water or sand-bottomed kiddy pools or the rip-roaring “Lava Slide.”

When the second infusion site came out, we decided to go back to injecting, for which I was entirely prepared.

Until the third morning.

Will bloused for his ninety-six carb breakfast, ate, then rushed off with his sister.  Only after the kids had cleared out with their dad and we made a plan to meet on the beach, only after I finished gathering sunscreen and magazines and books and hats and goggles and more sunscreen did I find Will’s plate.

With half a bagel and a most of the chocolate milk I saw him “cover.”

My kid was now headed—I was sure—into the ocean with enough extra insulin in his bloodstream to make for a serious hypoglycemic episode.

Filled with dread, I ran—barefoot—from the room down to where we had planned to meet.

There I found . . . Bill.

With the irrational stab of guilt that this was somehow my responsibility, my fault, I realized Bill hadn’t been fully apprised of the plan.

“Where’s Will?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” said Bill.  At which Bill and I made a new plan: find our kid.

With sudden sinking conviction, I sprinted up pathways through fronds and ferns because it had just occurred to me that if Will wasn’t with his dad, if he wasn’t at the pool I had scanned on my way to the beach, he might be in the adjoining room he was sharing with his brother and sister, and that he might be in that room alone and that he might be unconscious.

On the way, I tore through the gift shop, grabbing the orange juice I yelled that I would pay for later.

Which is when things got exciting.

I am normally a composed sort of person.  With this much fuel for my catastrophic fire, though, I started raving.

Who did I come across while sprinting and breathing hard and practically yelling through the gift shop that I was in the midst of a medical emergency?

Will’s younger sister!  My eleven-year-old worrier!

One look at me and she understood that we needed to find her brother.

Bill and Quentin scoured the beach.  Aidan ran back to the main pool.  I headed to the room.

At one end of our miles-long hallway, I found the poor maintenance person I yelled at because he didn’t—of course—have the skeleton key that I wanted him to magically produce to open the door I was getting more and more sure that my son was behind.

The maintenance man called security, who seemed to respond only hours later though I’m sure no more than a minute, a woman appearing at the end of the long hall in a corporate-looking suit and high heels only to have me yell at her that this was an emergency and she needed to RUN!

Which was when my daughter appeared at the other end of the hallway.

“I found him,” she called.  The adults in the hallway turned to face her.

“Oh my god,” I said, not worrying all that much about “swearing” in front of my daughter.

“Where was he?” I asked as if he’d been stranded on a nearby island.

“By the pool,” she said.  “Getting a shave ice.”

So here’s the thing.

Although I’m not proud of my lunatic actions, I’m also not embarrassed.  It’s not always terrible to act like a lunatic.  Especially when you have a child with T1D.

We catastrophic thinkers are–because we are catastrophic–more cautious and better prepared.  We are—when we don’t get too far ahead of ourselves—more comprehensive thinkers.

At least, this is what I tried to tell myself after I’d gone back and paid for the orange juice I’d stolen and when I found the cup of coffee that I’d set in a planter when I realized I needed to be running, and when I’d put a bandaid on the cut from running in bare feet and when I’d found my son, with his sister and younger brother and his father.

As though nothing had really happened, Will said, “Sorry!”

And I wasn’t upset because nothing really HAD happened.

He’d forgotten to eat some of his breakfast.

But he’s bright and responsible.  He knows his body and he knows his disease.

It’s not terrible that I over-worry sometimes.

But it’s good for everyone to remember that most of the time, catastrophic thinking is just that: thinking.