Presuming that you yourself are not diabetic, at 7 years old, you only know so much about diabetes. You know it’s bad, and that the old guy on television, who assures everyone that financial coverage for their diabetes test strips is available, is an ugly man. No 7-year-old aspires to be the diabetes test-strip guy.

In addition to those two diabetes-related facts, at 7 years old, you might now know that frequent urination is a symptom of diabetes because your mom just told your brother that his friend who goes to the bathroom a bunch of times might have diabetes. Your mother likely made this comment offhand, unaware of the scars it would leave on your psyche. She probably had no idea that, for the next 14 years of your life,every single time you used the bathroom twice in one hour, you would assume you had diabetes. She couldn’t have realized that you would eventually be an 11-year-old sitting through the last 10 minutes of “Van Helsing,” having to pee again and bargaining with God, making promises to be good if only he would take away the diabetes that you are absolutely positive you developed sometime during the Frankenstein scene. There’s just no way she could know that you would bring this quirk up biweekly with people ranging from strangers to close friends, laughing about it uncomfortably before you slip off to the bathroom. She couldn’t have known, you couldn’t have known, and god knows your brother’s friend couldn’t have known that his stupid bathroom habits would impact your life forever.

I guess what I’m saying is that moms are dangerous, and you should have bothered to find out if your brother’s friend actually had diabetes. But just keep getting tested every six months for the rest of your life, and never watch “Van Helsing” within 24 hours of ingesting a liquid.