A little pod hack

I have a diabetes friend called Andrea. She lives in France and I’ve known her for close to 15 years now. She once told me a hack that she thought Podders should know. I didn’t heed her advice and should have. So, in the spirit of #PayItForward (RIP, Bastian), I’m sharing it here.

Every pod user will be familiar with the pod scream of death. Maybe you have never experienced it yourself, but I expect you will have been told of all the impossibly inappropriate places a pod decides to play the music of its people.

Hopefully, it will be a rare occurrence, but there’s no mistaking the high-pitched scream that emits from a device that usually makes no other noise than a gentle, reassuring clicking sound when delivering insulin.

For me, it inevitably happens when the eight-hour grace period has lapsed and I’ve ignored all the countdown warnings. Be better than me. Don’t do that.

Silencing the piercing alarm is usually easily remedied. A sharp needle shoved into a small hole on the back of the pod usually does the trick. There’s something magical about the peace that prevails after the screaming stops.

The other day, I was working in my office at home, and was startled by the high-frequency shriek. I looked up from my computer screen and started counting hours backwards. Why was the bloody thing screaming at me? I’d changed it only the evening before. I glanced at my phone which showed a beautiful green loop, and tilted my ear towards the pod on my right arm that seemed happily doing its pod thing. It certainly wasn’t shouting at me.

I stood up, looking around for the source of the noise. The banshee wail was coming from the cardboard box on a shelf in my office – the box where my pods rest before being sent off for recycling. (Podders – you do all know about the recycling programme, right?)

I pulled the box down and looked inside. There were about 25 spent pods in there, and one of them was not happy. I worked my way through them, until I found the offending noise maker, and shoved a needle into its back.

I then looked suspiciously at the others in the box and realised that any of them could start screeching at any moment. What if they were influenced by the non-compliant noisy one? What if they decided to do the same thing at 3am? I dumped each of the pods onto my desk and stabbed the lot of them .

And while doing so, I remembered my clever friend Andrea telling me that she always disables the old pod when she’s doing a change. For this exact reason. ‘Smart,’ I thought. ‘I’m going to do that, too.’

Reader, I did not do that, too. I waited until an old pod threw a tantrum because it didn’t like being in the box with other pods and decided to share its big feelings.

In the spirit of sharing diabetes hacks, I am passing on Andrea’s smart advice: disable your pods before you pop them in the recycling box. Do it once you’ve filled up your next pod and you have a sharp needle right there to do it. Make it part of your pod changing process. Don’t leave it until you are frantically trying to silence the little sucker. Future you will thank you. That’s what I’m doing now.

And this is just another reminder of how the most important things we learn are from our friends with diabetes who know all the tips and tricks to make diabetes that tiny bit easier to manage.