Kylie Grimes was beyond exhausted.
It was 9:45 p.m. and she still hadn’t served dinner to her four kids. Her nerves had been worn thin after months of struggling to care for her two youngest children who had been diagnosed with diabetes. Between nighttime wake-ups and beeping monitors, she had been sleeping less than two hours at a stretch. Her husband was working late, 30 minutes from the house. Then her 11-month-old choked on soil from her house plant.
After calling poison control to make sure her son was OK, she called 911. When the dispatcher asked what the emergency was, Kylie said it was her.
“I just needed relief,” Kylie says in a phone interview with TODAY.com. “I needed the phones to stop beeping. I needed the kids to stop fighting. I needed the fear of trying to keep this baby alive to just subside for just a minute. I needed to just have a minute and come back in and collect myself.”
Even two months after the incident, the pain is still evident in Kylie’s voice. She speaks quickly at times, trying to convey every detail of her story accurately. But she pauses to hold back tears on more than one occasion.
In addition to being an overwhelmed mom, Kylie had become the medical caregiver for her two young children with diabetes. Her youngest, Noble, was under a year old at the time — and half of his diet was breastmilk, making Kylie’s responsibility even more consuming.
After months of trying to navigate all the demands, Kylie was burned out. Her husband was understandably concerned.
“Kylie’s the only one that I’m scared for. It’s so much harder on her,” says her husband, Kyle Grimes, who was also present for the phone interview.
“The kids are going to be OK because there’s a medical plan and an outline of what to do, but Kylie’s the one that’s going through the hardest of anyone because she has to be there when no one else is available to keep the kids alive.”
Two surprise diagnoses
Utah parents Kyle and Kylie Grimes have four children: Ellie 11, Royal 10, Goldie, 6, and Noble, 13 months.
In April 2025, Noble — then just 7 months old — was hospitalized with parainfluenza and walking pneumonia. He seemed to recover and was sent home, but at the end of that month, Noble began violently throwing up during his nap.
After a harrowing trip to the emergency room, Noble was ultimately diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes.
“It was frantic,” Kylie said of all the testing and confusion in the hospital. Though there was no history of diabetes in the family, the hospital staff tested Noble’s blood sugar level, which was much higher than it should have been.
Because a Type 1 diabetes diagnosis is so rare in a child this young, Noble remained in the hospital for eight days to determine his medical protocol. In fact, the diagnosis was so unusual that the nursing staff had to learn how to care for Noble along with his parents.
As the family attempted to settle into their new normal back home, the kids made a game of checking their blood sugar along with Noble. And 63 days after Noble was diagnosed (Kylie knew the exact time lapse), big sister Goldie tested her blood sugar … which registered at 416. According to Dr. Deena Adimoolam, an endocrinologist for Summit Health in New Jersey who did not treat the Grimes children, the normal range for a 6-year-old is just 90 to 180.
After returning to the hospital, Goldie was diagnosed with Stage 2, Type 1 diabetes. Adimoolam describes the condition as “the stage where the body’s immune system has started damaging the insulin-producing cells in the pancreas, leading to higher blood sugar levels, but the high sugars are not high enough to lead to symptoms.”
“I have two unicorn situations,” Kylie says. “I have a baby diabetic and I have a Stage 2 diabetic.”
People with Stage 1 and 2 don’t typically exhibit symptoms. In fact, the disease might not have been found this early in Goldie had it not been for her brother.
Going viral for being vulnerable
Kylie started a social media account when her kids received their diagnoses.
“I just thought we have to find a way to get our story out there to help those parents that come after us, so the world doesn’t feel so empty,” she says.
Even so, she waited several weeks to share what happened on the night she called for help, however. Her TikTok post currently has over 5 million views.
“The reason why I didn’t post it right away is I was really nervous about the judgment, and I was really nervous about how people would not think I’m confident to take care of my kids,” Kylie says. “But from the day of Noble’s diagnosis, I looked at my husband and I said, ‘We have to help these parents that come after us. This cannot be in vain.'”
“It’s given us an opportunity to find really who our circle and our community is,” Kyle adds. “The people that show up, not just for the first couple weeks because it’s fresh and it’s noisy and it’s loud and it’s painful, but the people that do continue to follow up months down the road.”
He adds, “It’s been an opportunity to break my heart down but then rebuild it in a more beautiful way.”
After the call for help
Did calling 911 give Kylie the relief she needed? Not exactly.
The police arrived and talked to Kylie, and they prompted a crisis therapist to call her afterward. Afterward, she still put the kids to bed, waking up multiple times throughout the night to care for them. It seemed like nothing had changed. But one small thing had shifted.
“My husband and I realized that we have to start asking for help,” Kylie shares. “We have to stop shouldering this by ourselves.”
Some of the help the Grimes family needs is simple, like bringing the trash cans to the street or picking up the kids at school. But some of it is intense.
Kyle’s mother is trying to better understand Noble’s needs — which are even confusing to endocrinologists — so she can give Kyle and Kylie a break.
“It’s understandingly overwhelming,” Kyle says, “to say, ‘Hey Mom, can you come watch your infant grandson and keep him alive so we can go handle something we’ve been putting off?'”
He continues, “The easiest thing to do when you find out someone’s struggling is go help them. And the hardest thing to do when you’re struggling is ask for help.”
“The best thing that has happened to me in this situation is that I haven’t felt alone,” Kylie says. “These little, tiny things people are doing remind me that I am doing the work, that I’m OK and that we’re figuring this out.”
This story first appeared on TODAY.com. More from TODAY:
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