There are some mistakes I’ve finally learned to avoid after all this time with type 1 diabetes.
Like assuming that the soda served is diet. I can say “diet,” the server can nod and confirm “diet,” but sometimes the soda arrives all bubbly and lovely and tasting off enough so that I pass it around the dinner table, asking my family, “Does this taste diet?” over and over again and no one ever can truly tell and they end up drinking it for me so I never find out.
Same for ordering take-away coffee. I know better than to dump in a packet of fake-sweetener-of-choice without sipping the coffee first to make sure it isn’t already sweetened.
Trust issues stem from my diagnosis date.
But there are a few mistakes I have made, on repeat.
Like forgetting to bolus for a meal. I make this mistake more regularly than I’d like to admit. Yeah, I’ll calculate the carbs and factor in the other variables (like exercise and mood and am I going to drive right after eating, etc). I make the promise to myself that I’ll input the carbs into the Mobi pump app and then issue the bolus.
I know this. I KNOW THIS.
And yet there are a bunch of times in recent memory where I’m putting the dinner dishes in the dishwasher and will stop and cartoon-slap my forehead, turning to the studio audience.
“I can’t believe I forgot to bolus!”
Cut to commercial.
I had a new gaffe a few weeks ago. It was a night of disrupted sleep (thanks, medieval body changes) and around 2 am, I moved my arm against the mattress and felt the distinctly soggy release of the tape around my infusion set. Usually I have my set on my arm and I wear a long sleeve t-shirt to bed in an attempt to protect the set. Only this time I was wearing a tank top like a ROOKIE and rolled the site, the plastic connection point for the infusion set waggling like a loose tooth.
But in my exhaustion, I convinced myself I had Olympic speed precision hands, somehow capable of taking that now-loose and flopping 6 mm plastic cannula and shoving it back through my skin. Just like the spring-loaded infusion applicator can, right?!
I was so tired. It would be okay to do it this way just this one time.
Nope, nope, nope. Rookie mistake all day because of course that plastic cannula didn’t re-pierce my skin. It’s a plastic tube, silly goose. Instead, the adhesive adheezed (?) and the cannula kinked and when I woke back up at 6.30 am, I hadn’t had any insulin in several hours.
And since I don’t make any insulin of my own, this was a problem.
I could see on the Dexcom graph when my rookie mistake earned rookie results. The line became a 75 degree angle, leaping up into the 300s and festering large ketones to boot. Cue the ketone nausea and water chugging I hadn’t experienced since that last summer at Clara Barton Camp.
It’s fascinating to me, the things I can still fumble after all this time.
Turns to camera.
“You’d think I was diagnosed yesterday, amirite?!”
Over-exaggerated wink.
Run credits.
