Like four years ago, I hosted a Halloween party and invited a bunch of my neighbors and friends.

A week or so after the party, there’s a knock on my door. It’s a lady from Child Protective Services.

I invite her in and she explains that she’s there because there was a report that I had a party and there were “syringes laying around” while children (including my own) were present.

I was dumbstruck. I mean, it was an absolute fucking outright lie and I don’t know why anyone at that party would say that shit. The hardest substance at the party was light beer.

The woman asked if she could do a basic safety check and I agreed. As intrusive and shitty as it felt, I let this stranger walk through my house and inspect everything.

We go into the master bathroom and she opens my medicine cabinet. ”Ah, I think I see the issue there here.” There was a box of insulin syringes sitting right there with a couple syringes inside.

My wife is a Type 1 diabetic. She had switched to the pump about a year prior but still had a couple syringes left and she figured she’d hang onto them incase anything ever malfunctioned with the pump. I took the lady back to the refrigerator and showed her the insulin my wife keeps.

She was like “Okay, I think I have what I need. I’ll be in contact in a few days.”*

It was one of the most stressful and horrible weeks of my life. I’d contacted our family lawyer who had put me in touch with a CPS attorney who told me to just chill out and wait to see what the next steps were going to be.

My wife felt like absolute shit. She was really hard on herself for not throwing out her old syringes.

Finally, after not hearing from the CPS agent for a week, I called her. She goes ”Oh, I’m so sorry. I meant to call you— but we sent a letter out. Your investigation was closed and marked unfounded.”

Biggest relief of my entire life. Like my knees almost buckled when she said it.

Then my attention turned to the perpetrator— and it wasn’t hard to figure out who it was. During the party, one of my neighbors asked if he could use another bathroom since he needed to go #2 and our guest bathroom opens up pretty much directly into the living room and foyer. I led him back to the master bathroom and let him do his thing.

The guy was a navy vet and former cop who had reportedly been forcibly “retired” due to some incident. He was a little rough around the edges— but he seemed like a good dude. When I first moved in, he helped me cut down a tree that had died in my backyard.

I confronted him and he was like ”I still have a duty to report anything I see, doesn’t matter if we’re neighbors and friends!” I told him that it was something that could’ve been easily explained if he simply fucking asked me and his reply to that was so ridiculous that I couldn’t help but laugh in his face:

”Well if I asked you about it, you woulda known I was snooping in your medicine cabinet and that woulda been awkward!”