I spent a good part of my youth in Scouts, but if we were ever lost in the woods and I had to rely on the navigation skills I supposedly learned there… we probably wouldn’t be getting home anytime soon.
But I do remember the motto:
“Always be prepared.”
It’s actually good advice for almost any situation. And that advice has come in particularly handy when living with diabetes. Even more so now that my son Owen has it too.
If we’re going to be more than about a half hour from home, I have to think about the myriad things that can happen if diabetes decides to throw one of its unexpected (but also very expected) curveballs.
A low blood sugar.
A sensor that suddenly stops working.
A pump site that fails.
All of those things can certainly happen.
I’ll admit that if I’m just running out the door by myself, I don’t always bring everything I probably should. But if Owen and I are going to be more than 45 minutes away, I bring what I guess you could consider the nuclear football.
No launch codes, but when we’re away from home it’s with me at all times (no handcuffs though). It carries all the diabetes supplies Owen and I might need if the situation calls for it.
- a glucose meter and alcohol swabs
- Novolog for Owen and Humalog for me
chargers for pumps and phones - infusion sets and pods
- Glucagon and treatments for lows
The one rule I was given when I got my first pump some twenty years ago was simple: always bring double what you think you’ll need.
Since both of us were due to change our infusion sites that day, I packed two pods for me and two cartridges and infusion sets for Owen.
You can call it overkill if you want. But if you do, your pancreas probably works.
The trip itself seemed simple enough: a drive of a little less than two hours to see my mom down the shore. Atlantic City was having its annual St. Patrick’s Day parade. The kids and I had gone last year and had fun, so I figured we’d do it again.
So we piled into the van and headed southeast.
Now that the kids each have their own phones, there’s no more arguing over what music to play. The van that once sounded like a traveling circus now sounds like a library with Wi-Fi with the occasional pump alert to break the silence
Of course we ate on the way down. I don’t know about you, but sitting in the car tends to make my blood sugar creep up while I’m driving, so I added a little extra insulin to our snack boluses.
Which worked great… until it didn’t.
We arrived just as Mom was heading out with a friend to mark a spot for the parade, so we quickly joined them, foldable chairs in tow.
We had just reached the spot where we planned to sit when both CGMs began alarming in unison.
Really?
The enthusiastic bolus we had taken for the road-trip snacks was apparently having second thoughts. Diabetes is not unlike Newton’s third law of motion: every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
Sure, I had low snacks with me, but having both CGMs go off before the afternoon had even begun felt like the universe trying to tell me something.
So Owen and I walked back to the car for more snacks while Mom and her friend took Peyton and Kendall to our viewing spot.
While we waited for the parade to start, I took the kids down to the water’s edge to look for shells and cool things in the sand.
Despite the initial discoveries near the boardwalk, a plethora of colored mini-bar bottles of alcohol (not surprising if you grew up there), we eventually made it down to the shoreline where the good stuff was: shells, driftwood, and seaweed.
Owen decided to skip the shell hunting and instead attempted to catch seagulls along the shoreline, which went about as well as you’d expect for a kid trying to catch seagulls. (Yes you guessed it, and a treatment to match the efforts.)
Eventually we heard the parade approaching and hurried back to the boardwalk. The kids loaded up on treats that only grandmoms are allowed to provide. While bagpipe bands played in unison, floats rolled past, and plenty of people who apparently discovered their Irish heritage for exactly one day each year walked and cheered along.
There were green outfits, red wigs, and beads and candy flying into the crowd.
All in all, a good afternoon.
It was on the walk back that my pod decided to let everyone know that I was out of insulin.
Well… at least we were headed back. We went up to Mom’s condo so I could change it and get ready for the drive home.
Owen only had a few units left himself, so I decided to swap his cartridge and infusion set before we got on the road.
So we both did site changes and everything was fine.
For exactly two minutes.
So two minutes later, I moved a little too close to the side as my oldest and I tried to move past each other in the hallway.
Riiiiip!
My brand-new pod caught the doorframe and launched off my arm like it had been ejected from a fighter jet.
Super, I thought to myself. Then, while I was bending down to retrieve the ejected pod, Owen came around the corner.
“Dad… I got an occlusion.”
“Are you kidding me?” We primed the pump and tried again.
Occlusion.
“Let’s give it one more chance.”
Occlusion. With the added perk that the pump automatically rewound the cartridge and informed us we now had to change that too.
So both of us sat back down in the same chairs we had been sitting in just a few minutes earlier.
New site.
New insulin.
New everything.
I tried repeating the same joke I’d made earlier, hoping the second time might land better.
“You’re weird, Dad.”
True.
Eventually both pumps were working again.
After about a half hour of the kids looking through old photos of my brother and me, most of which involved questionable haircuts, it was finally time to head home.
After hugs and loading back into the van, I was asked the same question I hear every time we leave my mom’s.
“We’re going to McDonald’s on the way home, right Dad?”
There’s a McDonald’s right before the expressway, and stopping there has become a non-negotiable tradition on the drive home.
The kids start asking about it the minute we get in the car and stay on topic right up until we make the left turn into the drive-through.
One time. Just one time I drove right past it without stopping. I’ll never hear the end of it
Three meals of chicken nuggets with fries and a matching number of Shamrock Shakes later, (there are only so many chances for Dad to be a hero) we were on the road home.
In the quiet of the kids absorbed in their technology, I thought about the afternoon.
The technology Owen and I wear is life-changing. And no, that’s not an exaggeration.
But it’s not perfect, and relying on it to be perfect is a hard lesson to learn.
Thankfully I made most of my mistakes in the early years of using a pump, so Owen won’t have to learn the same lessons the hard way.
But that story is for another time.