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I run on a double A battery. Yep, that’s what keeps me alive. My pump uses one single AA battery to deliver insulin throughout the day, receive information from my CGM and then report it back to me. The battery lights my pump, makes it vibrate and alarms when it needs me to look at it.
It doesn’t matter that AA batteries are easy to find, without the right tools, it’s not gonna work.
I learnt this last week when my pump battery was completely dead and I couldn’t for the life of me find a five cent (or ten) cent coin to open the battery cap of my pump, extract the spent battery and insert a new, fully charged battery to start giving me juice again.
I rummaged and searched for the right coin and then tried other things, getting more and more frustrated. (FYI – twenty cent coins don’t work, neither does a knife, my finger nail, a piece of cardboard or a pair of scissors). Nope. No luck. Eventually, at the bottom of my handbag, I found a lonely five cent piece and changed the battery, adding the coin to my ‘diabetes contingency bag’ for next time.
Not the right tool.
I needed the right tool.
I was reminded of this yesterday afternoon when I tried to hammer a fallen picture hook back into the wall with a tiny hammer. Didn’t work. No matter how hard I bashed, there wasn’t enough weight in the hammer head to push the picture hook back in the wall.
Anyone else would have probably worked that out just by looking at it. But not me. Possible because I was being…. a right tool.
Am I the only one singing ‘If I Had a Hammer’ right now?
I woke up this morning with that unpleasant and disagreeably familiar feeling. Ever-so-slight nausea, furry mouth and a desperate need to go to the loo. Why was I high? I grabbed my meter and a lovely number in the low 20s appeared for me. ‘Eff you, diabetes’ I thought.
I rushed to the loo, brushed my teeth, drank two glasses of icy-cold water. And grabbed my pump to see a completely dead, black screen. ‘What the eff?’ (Second f-bomb for the morning and I’d been awake for a total of five minutes. It was shaping up to be a good day.) I pressed buttons, trying to wake my pump up. Maybe it was having trouble getting the week started too. Nothing. Completely and utterly blank and unresponsive.
I rummaged around for a spare battery and located one in my diabetes supplies bag (seriously, every contingency is catered for in that bag!) and changed batteries. It responded with a lovely sounding ‘Boo-beep!’ and fired into action.
I primed, bolused, checked for ketones (too little to be too concerned about), drank more water and started my getting-ready-for-work routine.
Crisis averted, but how long had my pump been dead? And did it alarm? And if it did, how did the whole household not get woken by it? (And the neighbours for that matter. Living in inner-city Melbourne means we almost live on top of each other!) The alarm on the pump is loud, constant and downright annoying until it is silenced with a button push (or new battery). It wakes everyone – people and pets alike.
There was no low battery alarm before bedtime last night, so I had no warning this was going to happen and I slept like a log, not waking for anything until the alarm went off this morning. Is it possible that my pump had died just after I went to bed and I was insulin-free for 8 hours? Surely not, given the negligible ketones in my blood this morning.
I’m putting in a call to the pump company today because I don’t think that this is okay. There needs to be a much longer warning period for a dying battery.
Now I’m at work and I have that slightly fuzzy-head feeling that comes from high sugars. I’m guzzling water and checking my sugars (and ketones) regularly, trying not to over-bolus in a desperate attempt to get by BGLs back into single figures.
A dead pump. In 13 years of pumping that’s never happened. Diabetes – and diabetes therapies – have a way of making sure you never get complacent. Effing diabetes. (That’s number three…..)
