The Ol' Switch-A-Roo

We have three.

Three boys who have Type 1 Diabetes.

Three pumps that deliver insulin.

Three of each.

Each boy has their own color pump. J’s is blue, B’s is purple and L’s is…well Zebra. We got all the boys stickers that go onto their pump to keep ourselves from mixing them up. J and B ripped theirs off within a month…L kept his zebra stripes, and is still very proud of them. Needless to say, we never mix up L’s pump with anyone else. L is the Zebra…my other boys wouldn’t be caught dead with zebra stripes.

But the blue and the purple…well, they are not as simple.

It’s a dark purple. For sure not blue, but not obviously bright or anything, and when you are doing set changes in the middle of the night, they look almost identical.

(You already know where I am going with this…right?)

So the other night it happened. Ryan set up the pumps, refilled with insulin and put them on the respective boys. And when I went to calibrate J’s new CGM with his pump, I was horrified to find that it wasn’t working. There was nothing there that indicated that the CGM was communicating with the pump. Even worse, when I went into J’s system to “find sensor” it didn’t show that the sensor feature was even on! What happened? Do we have to redo all of the settings every time we change a set?? It was like the twilight zone! A bad dream, that was real! Ryan and I puzzled for awhile. I was gobsmacked! How in the freakin’ world could this have happened??

It took awhile for us to figure out that Ryan had put B’s pump on J. Too long if you ask me. In hindsight I feel like what my hubby and I call a DOPUS. It’s kinda a mix of Dope and ignoramus. It was a real wake- up call because A) J gets twice the insulin B does (Hello scary, B’s blood sugar would have dropped like a brick in no time!!) and B) B get’s half the insulin of J. (Hello scary, J would have had so little insulin, his numbers would have been THROUGH THE ROOF in the morning!!)

No, it’s not the first time it’s happened. After bath and showers, they have put the wrong ones on themselves. It’s not completely problematic because it happens very rarely.

But it only takes ONCE to make a mess of things.

ONE TIME.

I think that is one of the greatest arguments of why diabetes sucks so much. There isn’t leverage for forgetfulness. You can’t afford to “forget” to bolus after a meal. You can’t afford to “forget” to check blood sugars. You can’t afford to “forget” to correct a high blood sugar. You can’t “forget” that J wears the blue pump and B wears the purple one!

No forgetting allowed!

EVER!!!!!!!!!!!!

That is why our brains are running a mile a minute, all the time, 24/7.
And that is why when we don’t have a diabetic child with you, your brain jumps into some kind of tailspin of emotions wondering where all the thinking has gone. Guilt for not thinking about it. Confusion as to why you stopped thinking about it.

Our brain gets tripped up going from 100 miles an hour to 0 miles an hour.

Hard to relax when you don’t HAVE to think about diabetes. But really, when do we NOT get to think about it?? Even when the boys are at school, they are calling me with their numbers and carb amounts, alerting me to any extra exercise and such. When they are not with me, I am worrying…I am THINKING ABOUT IT!!!

The only time my brain really gets a break, and no it isn’t at night when normal people sleep…HECK NO! It is when I go out on a date with my hubby, and my sister in law babysits.

She knows what to do. I TRUST her. I can honestly throw the kids out of the car and know they are safe and their diabetes is handled.

It is a gift. The gift to forget.

My husband and I didn’t get to go out this weekend. Trust me, my brain feels it. When you run at a 100 miles an hour for such a long stretch, your brain runs out of fluid, and it still continues to run even though smoke is coming out of your ears and the cogs are screeching so loud you just might think you are going to explode.


Sometimes I wish I could pull the ol’ switch-a-roo with someone else’s brain.
“OPPS! I accidentally grabbed your brain by mistake; I’ll give it back to you on Wednesday…”

Because the thing is, I am more than a pancreas. I am human, and I have normal everyday human things to worry about too. As parents of diabetics, we can just as easily overload on diabetes, as we can on every other aspect of life. And when the two or more of your cogs overload at the same time…well…I guess you get a blog post that ends abruptly and looks a lot like this one.