Friday

It was 6:45 p.m.

My daughter had gone straight from play practice to meet friends who were watching the end of a wrestling match in the high school gym. The plan was to go out for dinner afterwards.

I received a text:

'Dexi is dead and the meter won't turn on.'

We knew the Dexcom sensor was set to expire before the evening was out. But plan B was that she had her meter and would be fine using that instead.

But now she was not.

I grabbed two AAA batteries and let her know I would meet her at the front doors of the school.

'But what if it isn't the batteries?,' my daughter wisely replied.

So I also grabbed her spare pink one-touch mini meter.  Since two dead meters don't equal a useful one, I popped in a test strip to check it, and, inevitably, its battery was dead. It takes one obscure flat battery. By the time I found a spare one of those, the contents of our 'diabetes box' were strewn across my daughter's floor and she was texting, 'Are you here yet?'

I pulled up to the doors, and she came out. She sat in the car with me and replaced the batteries in the regular meter. "Low meter batteries," it read.

"But I just put them in there- you brought new batteries, right?" I had, straight out of a container full of new batteries in the basement, I reassured her. Fortunately, the pink mini meter was working just fine so she was equipped for dinner.

She enjoyed her evening out and got home early enough to put in a new Dexcom sensor before bed.

The next morning I replaced the batteries in the usual meter one more time, and it worked.

Weird stuff can happen on any given Friday.

After Midnight

"Mom?"

"Mom?"  My eyes must have opened slightly, or I mumbled something.

"Something's wrong with my pump."

And then I was awake.

"It was beeping when it woke me up … booEEp, booEEp … but now it's dead. Nothing happens when I push the buttons. And it's hot."

It was the wee hours of the morning. We were on vacation in a cottage near the beach.

"Ok- let's see."

I got up and followed her back to her little room where we turned on a light and set to work.

Hoping the simplest explanation was the right one, I took out the battery, using a coin from the pile on her bedside table set aside for an expedition to the penny candy store. The battery was hot.

I inserted a new battery and screwed the cap back on. I prayed, thought good thoughts, and implored the diabetes gods for mercy. The pump would spring back to life. We would not, in the middle of the night, on vacation, have to go back to injecting insulin for the first time in 13 years.

Time stood still for an infinite moment and then, there it was, the familiar alien-like startup beep of the Animas pump. I confirmed, when prompted, the battery type, and the date and time, which were reassuringly still correct. Then, as the pump requires with every battery replacement, I set in motion a full rewind of the cartridge area. Knowing that the full rewind also signals the pump to perform a full system check I once again sent out pleas to the universe that a pump failure would not, please, be among our vacation memories.

The motor whirred. And whirred. And whirred. And then...

"beep!" Just the usual, friendly little 'I'm ready,' beep. I finished the process and my daughter reconnected.

Still more than a little freaked out, and now wide awake, I photographed every pump setting, not sure if my most recent records were recent enough. I tucked my daughter in and returned to bed where I lay; not at all optimistic that the crisis had actually been averted. I considered all of the options for obtaining a replacement pump if need be. I sorted out what I could remember about multiple daily injections. I tried to figure out what had happened in the first place. I got up twice to make sure her blood sugar was staying steady- that the pump was still working correctly.

In the light of day, with the pump working properly again, the explanation seemed fairly logical. The hot battery was familiar from times we've changed it after the 'I'm going to die in half an hour or less' warning. The initial low battery warning, indicating a couple of days' power remaining, had been visible on the pump for at least most of that day, my daughter said, and she'd planned to change it during the next day's site change.  But it's possible it had been there longer, since we were in vacation mode and, as is our custom, paying less attention to diabetes than usual while enjoying vacation things. Or maybe the battery died a little faster than usual with all the extra use for vacation food. Maybe the pump alarmed for the full half an hour foretelling its imminent demise, and simply didn't wake my daughter from her vacation-induced deep slumber - we'd been out late and came home tired.

All that really matters is that the new battery continues to work just fine, a couple of weeks later, and we were able to enjoy the rest of our vacation.

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. 

So Easy

 

 

There's nothing easy about living with diabetes. 

 

We live with a Mobius strip of a to-do list.

 

The required tasks involve varying degrees of difficulty and frustration.

 

So every time the pump battery needs to be changed, I smile.

 

Someone at Animas took the time to make this particular chore as easy as it could possibly be.

 

If only all of our electronic devices came with an almost life-sized pictograph complete with the type of battery printed on it. 

 

 

ALARM

The meter asked nicely first, on Sunday if I recall correctly.  "Replace meter batteries soon." Or some similar request accompanied by a gentle, high pitched 'beep beep.'  It asks for new batteries periodically, and thus far we've always replaced them by the third or fourth reminder.

But we didn't. We had all kinds of excuses. We were out to dinner. The batteries were in the basement.  The phone was ringing. It was bedtime.  I'd do it after the getting to school chaos had ended.  We were about to sit down to eat. 

So today, it decided we needed stronger words:

This message was still accompanied by the gentle 'beep beep,'
though it reads like it should be accompanied by a blaring horn.




We've never ignored the gentle reminder long enough to get yelled at like this before. It worked, of course.  The batteries are changed and things are back to normal.  Sometimes we just need to be spoken to in no uncertain terms.