BEEP BEEP. That familiar sound means it’s been 3 days. Time to change the insulin pod. A slight inconvenience, maybe a bit of an irritating reminder that diabetes doesn’t care what you’re in the middle of. But it’s not really a big deal I guess. Until he went to grab a new pod from the cupboard and I heard, “Mom, the box of pods is empty.”
No, that can’t be right. That CAN’T be right!
There were boxes of them. Boxes… plural. I’m sure of it. We can’t be out of pods.
Yet somehow
He’s nine. He must not be looking in the right place.
That’s part of a mom’s job right? To find the things they’re looking for. They will insist that it’s nowhere to be found, and you’ll find it right in front of their faces. Kids do that all the time. He must not be seeing them, right?
The cupboard was full.
Boxes of Dexcom sensors, test strips, random glucose and ketone meters… but no pods.
How could I have let that happen? He needs those to live. And we ran out. Why didn’t I notice that we were low? That an empty box had been put back in the cupboard? How did I forget to order pods?!?
Ok, we can figure this out
Pods give a warning several hours before they actually need to be changed. We have a bit of time. I can find someone local who uses them and borrow a couple while we wait for our order to come in. It’ll be fine.
So, I tell my son not to take his pod off yet. It’s no big deal.
To which he replies, “I already took it off.”
Slight panic.
Ok, so he’s already had a few minutes of no basal insulin, but his Dex numbers are on the low side, so it’ll take a bit for his blood glucose to go high.
That’s good. We still have some time.
I’ll have to give a bit of a bolus to cover the missed basal, but it should be ok.
How did we run out of pods??
I post in our local Facebook group that we’re out of pods and ask if anyone has a couple we could borrow. As the minutes tick by like hours, I try to figure out how we ran out of pods in the first place.
He has had type 1 diabetes since he was 2 years old.
We used to do all of his care, but as he got older, we gradually taught him how to do the tasks.
When he was 4, we started letting him work his pump. We always looked over his shoulder and made sure he was doing it all correctly.
As he got older, he learned more.
He can add up the carbs, SWAG, and change his own pods now. We don’t look over his shoulder much anymore.
That’s it. That’s the problem.
He’s been changing his own pods. And I haven’t been keeping track. I assumed he’d tell me when we got low. He assumed I was looking over his shoulder.
I should have been.
I should have known that the boy who puts empty milk jugs back in the fridge would also put an empty Omnipod box back in the cupboard.
But I didn’t.
Thank god for community
Our community is amazing!
It only took a few minutes for several people to reply to my post. When all was said and done, it was just over an hour from when the previous pod was removed to the new one being inserted.
If you know anything about me, you’ll know that I love the T1D community.
But I don’t rely on it entirely.
We are prepared in other ways. We have an old Animas Ping pump from before our switch to Omnipod. It works perfectly well and we could have used that in a pinch. We also have insulin pens and long-acting insulin in the fridge. The worst case scenario would have been that we would have had to switch back to pens for a few days.
Getting pods from a fellow MOD was much easier though. And I’m really grateful to have the community we have.
Because parenting a child with T1D isn’t easy.
There is no book that tells you how to do it. No T1 parenting courses.
It’s juggling so much and learning so much and doing and planning and avoiding consequences and celebrating accomplishments.
It’s knowing about burn out and diabulimia. Memorizing the carb counts on every nutrition label. Fighting the school system and the misconceptions about T1.
It’s all of those things and so much more. And sometimes, you are so focused on all of that other stuff, that you run out of pods.
Happy carb counting!
~ Leah
Have you ever run out of something important like that without realizing it? Tell me about it in the comments!! Don’t forget to head over to the Carb Counting Mama Facebook page and “like” it!!
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