Apparition

I woke slowly, confused.  It was definitely the middle of the night.

I thought I'd heard footsteps, which would ordinarily mean my husband had gotten up, but he was still in bed.  I opened my eyes as my husband sleepily said, 'Hi?'

There she was, in front of me: my kid. I said her name groggily, with a question mark at the end, like I wasn't sure who she was.  But the real question was what she was doing there, a foot from my face.

"What's going on?"  The more awake I got the more worried I got about the possibilities. She was sick, or something had gone awry in the house (flood? electrical?), or something had scared her terribly.  I could not remember the last time she'd showed up in our room in the middle of the night.  There was definitely a problem.

"My pump is alarming.  The battery is dead."

"Okay...  Let's go."

She and I stumbled back into her room.  She found a quarter and I found a battery.  We switched out the battery and rewound and re-primed the pump as per procedure. 

"I don't know how I missed that the battery was low," she said by way of apology, "I guess I use the meter remote more now so I don't notice it as much."  The pump screen does give fair notice- usually at least a week for us- that the battery should be changed and we ordinarily change it with a regular site change after we've been warned.  It's preferable to 2:38 a.m. on a Wednesday. 

"I'll try to check more often and notice."

What could I say?  "I'm guessing you will...this isn't much fun."

She checked her blood sugar, not knowing quite how long the pump had been alarming and how much insulin she'd missed, but it apparently hadn't been long enough to cause any real spike. 

So I shut her light back off and tucked her back in with a kiss, grateful that it didn't turn out to be a true emergency.  It was just another night with diabetes.