A Very Late Thanksgiving Post

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving.

We sure did-- though I'm afraid it didn't start out that way.

You see, our day began at 4 am-- when Ryan pricked Joseph's finger and discovered his blood sugar was 268.

Now, while this was certainly not a scary high number, it was still troubling-- given that Ryan had bolused a correction just two hours earlier to bring down a minor high (180).

Worse yet, when Ryan attempted to bolus yet another correction, Joseph's pump alarmed, displaying instructions to remove the battery, and then an error code and a "Call For Service" message.

Thus it was at approximately 4:03, that I opened my eyes to a bright overhead light, and my husband standing over me-- holding out a small lithium battery, as he calmly explained the situation.

It took several seconds for me to process what he was saying.

And then I leapt out of bed and made for Joseph's room, finding my son sitting on the edge of his bed looking exhausted and wearing a concerned expression.

"It's okay, we just need to put the battery back in to reboot the pump," I told him.

Ryan popped in the battery, screwed on the cap, then handed me the pump. But when I tried to program a bolus, I got a message that said the pump was not primed-- that's when I realized we needed to rewind, reload and re-prime the thing.

Once done, it appeared we were back in business. We then gave Joseph a corrective bolus of just .6 of a unit-- this rather than an injection because we assumed the rise in his bg was connected to the pump alarm (since he had a new infusion site that looked good and had worked well for the previous 12 hours).

As Ryan headed back to our bedroom, I started down the stairs.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"I'm calling Animas." I said in an exhausted, angry voice. "There's no reason we should be the only ones awake at this hour-- and besides, we have no idea what that error code meant and the pump did say 'Call For Service'."

To their credit, I heard back from an Animas nurse within three minutes of my call.

After I explained what had happened, the nurse said that what we'd seen was a "general processing error-- nothing to be concerned about," and that they would replace the pump if we saw two more of those errors within 30 days of this one.

She also firmly believed that Joseph's post-correction high had nothing to do with the pump alarm, and was far more likely due to a bad infusion site.

Hmmm.... I didn't think so.

When we checked Joseph again at 6 am, his blood sugar had dropped significantly-- to 160.

By 7:30, he coasted in at a very nice 118.

Clearly, his site was still good.

Again, hmmm....

Anyhow, with this early morning excitement we'd apparently filled our stress quota for the day-- because the remainder of our Thanksgiving was perfectly wonderful.

We spent the afternoon and evening at the home of some very good friends-- talking and eating; eating and, well, talking.

The kids tossed a football in the backyard, and played for hours with our friends' new puppy.

It was lovely.

Oh and because I had no turkey to care for, I worked on this for the better part of the morning (post pump troubleshooting, that is):


An Almond-Kahlua Torte with a Bittersweet Chocolate Glaze.

This was my first attempt at a torte, and (surprisingly) it was really, really good.

In addition to the above, we had the usual fare-- turkey, stuffing, sweet and mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, apple pie...

And while Joseph had portions of almost all of it-- his blood sugars remained relatively steady throughout the day.

For that, I am indeed thankful.

But even more so, for these two...



... and for their amazing dad.