The day my insulin pump died or why I'm NEVER going back onto injections

I thought this would be fitting for my first post....

This all started last Sunday (the 4th) though I didn't know it yet. My pump gave me a low battery warning, which, in itself, isn't really out of the ordinary. As it's been super cold the last week, I thought that might be why I got the low battery. So I changed it, and thought nothing of it.

It was two days later that I complained a bit to my mom. I told her that my pump seemed to be going through batteries (running on AAA's, they're a bit expensive). She told me that maybe I should phone someone else who has a pump, just to see if they're also experiencing this problem. So I phoned, and they told me to phone the pump company's 24-hour help line.

The guy there asked me to go through the pump's alert history and tell him how many low battery warnings I've had. It turned out there were 3 in the last 3 days. He told me it might just be the box of batteries, but to be on the safe side, they'd send me a new pump.

I phoned my dad to bring a new box of batteries home with him. A little while later, just before my dad was due home, the pump told me to change the battery in it. So I tried the rest of the one box that I had and the pump wouldn't recognize any of them!

Luckily, my dad came home a little while later. Out of the new box of batteries, the second one worked fine. But I noticed that within the hour the battery icon was already showing some of the power was gone. I went out to a later show with a friend, and by the time I got there, just 3 hours later, I already had a low battery warning!

When I got home, I was going to play Starcraft with the same friend online. Before we started, I decided to change the battery, just so I didn't have to in the middle of a game. This is when things went really bad: I tried every one of the batteries left in the new box (14) and the pump wouldn't recognize ANY of them!

So, on to plan B. Plan B consisted of me going back onto insulin injections until the new pump came in a day or two. That first night was really brutal: I didn't have a long acting insulin like NPH to get me through the night so I had to get up every 4-5 hours to give myself a new injection. Needless to say, I only got about 5 hours of sleep altogether (which was not helped by the insulin reaction I had at 8:30 the next day due to me miscalculating the 5am insulin dose).

The next, I went and bought NPH as soon as I could. Most of my injections coincided with time off between classes, so I didn't have too much of a problem until supper time. The supper injection was due between about 6 and 7pm; I have a class from 5:30-7, and another one from 7-10. In the end, I decided to skip the 7-10 class so I could come home and eat.

But that whole day, I was afraid to exercise in case I had miscalculated another dose. Plus I kept running into another problem: when I'm on the pump, I can eat anything whenever I want. Not so with injections. I didn't want to have all kinds of different doses of insulin working, so I only ate when I took the injections every 4-5 hours. Plus I remembered having to have a bed time snack, but I had absolutely no idea how much to eat!!!

Needless to say, I was incredibly happy when I could finally get back onto a pump on the 8th. (Of course, as luck would have it, I did an injection in the morning, and the pump was delivered to my door like 2 minutes later so I had to wait until the injection wore off 4-5 hours later to go back onto the pump!) In a way, it was a good wake-up call - now I know why I'm on the pump. And I'm absolutely positive that I'm not voluntarily going back onto injections ever!!!!