The Battery

It’s 2 a.m. 

My husband is standing next to me.

“Hey.  How long do we have when the pump has a low battery alarm?”

“You mean it’s down one bar?” I asked, hoping we had a day or two.

“No…it beeped or something.”

“Half an hour,” I said as I crawled out of bed. 

My husband is a great partner in the care of my daughter’s diabetes (and rightfully insisted that I include a disclaimer if I wrote this story).  He can do all of the everyday things, like helping with blood sugar checks, carbohydrate counting, and bolusing.  He knows how to change sites, and set temporary basal rates.  He probably could have figured out how to change the battery too, but he’s never done it.  Two a.m. didn’t seem like the time to give it a try.

So there I stood, by her bed. How had I missed the earlier low battery signal? She usually tells me as soon as it appears.  I pushed a button on the pump to “wake it up,” hoping that in his sleepy haze my husband had misunderstood what was happening.  No such luck.

Thankfully, we keep spare batteries upstairs, not just in the closet, so I located one of those easily.  But I needed a coin to twist off the battery cap.  I briefly considered breaking into my daughter’s piggy bank, but stumbled off to find my purse.  I unhooked the pump, took it out of the fanny pack, unscrewed the cap, switched the batteries, rewound and re-primed the pump as prompted, and reattached it to my sleeping daughter.  I tucked her back in, and went back to bed, but I was wide awake.  The next day was long.

In the morning, she appeared.  “Can I keep this quarter I found on my dresser?”

“Of course you can, sweetie.”