Insulin Pump Woes

I love my insulin pump. It's easy to use, convenient, runs on AAA batteries instead of nearly-impossible-to-find-in-a-store button batteries, and has a blood glucose meter attachment so that, after I check my blood sugar, it tells me how much insulin I need, if any.

However, it is annoying. I set the thing on vibrate so that, if it starts alarming me during Algebra class, it won't distract other people. But the vibration drives me nuts sometimes.

It has blood sugar testing reminders that the user of the pump can set to go off at almost any point during the day. It has reminders for if I forget to bolus for a meal, reminders if the insulin inside the pump needs to be refilled, and many other little reminder-alarm thingies. Therefore, the pump vibrates very often. And it drives me crazy fairly often. If it vibrates at me when I'm in a bad mood, I might yell at it or something. Not that the pump cares—it's a computer the size of a cell phone.

Anyway, I try to not get terribly mad at the thing because I set most of the reminders myself. I can't really complain when I told it to remind me to test for lunch.

I guess this suppression of my annoyance has sneaked its way into my dreams. I will have a dream where my pump will vibrate to remind me to test my blood glucose, and I will push "OK" to get the thing to stop vibrating. Soon after, it will vibrate with another reminder for me. I push "OK" again, slightly annoyed. It keeps vibrating reminders at me, and each time I push "OK" to get the thing to shut up, I get a little madder. I might even tell a person in the dream how annoying it is. Then, I wake up from the dream to find out that my pump has been vibrating at me, once a minute, for the past ten minutes or so. Or maybe the past hour. Then all I want to do is put the thing into the blender on high power, but I just turn it off and go back to sleep.

But it is better than an audible, siren-like alarm. My first insulin pump, while it could be set to vibrate instead of beep (or imitate an ambulance's siren), used expensive, hard-to-find-without-special-ordering batteries. Putting the settings for any pump for the thing to vibrate instead of beep makes the battery run out very quickly, so I set the pump to beep instead.

One night, I woke up to something that sounded like an alarm. It was very loud. I went out of my room, saw the smoke alarm, and assumed it must be alarming. There was no fire, so I thought that it might be malfunctioning or telling us it had a low battery or something. I knocked on my parents' door to ask them to get a ladder to turn the thing off so I could sleep or something, but my mom just told me to try to sleep and wait until morning to turn the thing off. I went back to my room, surprised that the alarm seemed to be as loud with my door closed than it was with my door open (the smoke detector was in the hallway outside of my room.) Then I realized it was my insulin pump, telling me that my infusion site was clogged.

So, vibrate has its merits...it's just annoying.