A Glimpse Of Vulnerability

Last night my insulin pump system went kaput for the second time. Lights out, completely DOA. Until that point it was just a quiet Sunday night of working away by myself but the piercing beep of my Omnipod meter suddenly screaming through the flat was unmistakable, to me and and no doubt plenty of dogs in the vicinity.

This is an infrequent but familiar alarm which resulted in no more than a sigh as I tried to reset the meter, as I have done before. Nothing. Just a very weak, flashing start-up screen that was clearly in no way capable of performing its primary function as my replica pancreas. A quick call to Insulet tech support was all it took to officially declare the thing permanently out of action. Just like that.

I didn’t panic; I wasn’t worried. It had happened before and unlike last time I had all the supplies I needed to keep myself alive.

But as I sat holding the innocent piece of plastic; this box that’s never more than a few metres from my side at any time of the day or night, with its wealth of painstakingly tailored settings now rendered inaccessible… it hit me that I’d just very suddenly lost my lifeline.

I joke about type 1 diabetes being ridiculous and inconvenient but mostly ok, and it IS those things as well as being an absolute mind-maze of chronic chaos. I manage my condition fiercely independently, because I have to and I want to. My loved ones are so invaluable to me in every possible way, but despite the occasional, ‘argh my blood sugars are shit today’, I try and just get on with it in the way that so many do, so as not to burden more people with the complicated web in my head – which I probably couldn’t extract if I wanted to.

But at 11pm on a Sunday night as I sat there – in the deafening silence, in the glow of my laptop – looking at the blinking, withering screen… I was painfully aware of how much I’ve come to rely on this little guy. How it’s in fact my ultimate partner. A partner that just had all but ghosted me in the dead of the night.

Last time this happened (the pump, not the ghosting) was some 2 years ago now. The insulin cartridges for my long forgotten backup injections were out of date, and my alternative glucose meter had no battery. I was taught a valuable lesson then, but if this time had been that time there would have been no emergency GP to hop over to. No open pharmacy to suddenly make it all go from alarmingly threatening to beyond manageable. But then, so much of type 1 is this fine line between being strut-down-the-street dandy and almost-nearly-maybe utterly terrifying, isn’t it?

You don’t know what you don’t know, and you don’t know what you don’t have until you need it to stay alive.

This is in no way a sympathy post – like I said, there was absolutely no drama. I put my armour back on this morning and carried on as normal, feeling fine and so, so grateful to have insulin and a functioning body. But these moments are as important to highlight as the shiny bits, the fun bits, the laughing into the sunset bits. It can be hard to scroll through endless feeds of people who seemingly have it all figured out – diabetes or otherwise – and it’s not the case, because there’s simply too much at play. Sometimes we’re ticking along quite nicely, and suddenly, momentarily, we’re vulnerable.