Pump Failure

Okay, so last night I’m getting Joseph ready for bed– checking his blood sugar, and then checking his basal setting on his pump. It’s 10 o’clock. I know, I know, kind of late for a kid who has to go to school in the morning, but he just HAD to see the finale of The Amazing Race. (As did I).

Anyhow, I hit the backlight button on Joseph’s pump to “wake it up,” and the screen lights up. But no display. Nothing. No words. No numbers.
A complete and utter blank.

Now THIS is a problem.

For you see, without a display I have no idea what the pump is doing– I cannot adjust his basal, I cannot give him a bolus.

Initially I thought if I just push the backlight button a few times, the damn thing would wake up. And it worked – sort of. The pump alarm went off, then it began to vibrate so vigorously I thought it was going to jump right out of my hands. This was not good. I stayed calm– primarily because Joseph looked as if he was going to lose it any second. “Mom, what can we do? Why isn’t it working?” he asked while choking back tears. I could understand why. After all, in the less than four months he’d been wearing his pump it had truly become a part of him. A part he could trust– unlike his pancreas.
At that moment I wanted to strike the person who made this pump.

So I said we’ll call Animas – that’s the pump company – and find out what to do next. I put in the call, and received a call back about three minutes later. I was told that Joseph would be sent a replacement pump, however, because it was so late in the evening, we wouldn’t receive the new pump until Thursday morning. Dang! In those few minutes it took for Animas to call back, I’d had the irrational fantasy that they’d put a pump on a truck that evening, and we’d wake up to find it on our doorstep in the morning....

Next call– “pediatric diabetes physician on call.” Again, the call back was quick. We were to put Joseph back on shots (obviously) until the new pump arrived. Happily we had a nice stash of Lantus in the fridge for just such an occasion. I’d always hoped it would just sit there, gathering dust, like an insurance policy untainted by a claim. Oh well.

Joseph was NOT pleased with the whole shot thing. Neither was I. But pulling out a vial, pushing in air, then drawing insulin into a syringe. Trying to find a fleshy part on the back of his arm, then pinching up the skin. Holding the syringe like a dart and poking it in quickly, pushing the back of it – in and out, just like that.
Like riding a bike. You never do forget.

Though we all look forward to the arrival of his new pump, I must say this incident has me more than a little shaken. We are so dependent on this device. Losing the display was bad-- very bad. But what if the malfunction had caused something more than a terrible inconvenience? What if insulin delivery had been affected? You can go crazy thinking about these kinds of scenarios. About our child’s vulnerability while wearing this device.

But we have no choice really. A pump will give him the best glucose control. And, if we want to give him the best odds for a complication-free future, then we must trust ourselves and the technology we’ve chosen to help ensure he has that future.