Wrong Button

I learned a valuable lesson about diabetes blogging a few years ago. One of my readers told me that there are times when reading caregiver blogs can make her feel like a failure because so many of them only talk about what goes right... I try not to do that anymore.

The other night, for the first time in over six years, I pushed the wrong button. As you can see on the DexCom graph above, Arden was having a bit of trouble with lows after she went to bed. I was able to avoid waking her prior to midnight by shutting off her basal insulin for 30 minutes. When her BG began to fall again sometime around one in the morning, I decided to restrict her basal once more, this time for one hour.

I've looked at the menus a bunch since this happened but I still can't figure out how I made this mistake, but I certainly did. To make matters worse I didn't hear the DexCom alarm until around five in the morning. When I walked into her room and picked up the Dex, I couldn't believe what I saw, "INSULIN DELIVERY SUSPENDED". I somehow shut off Arden's insulin delivery instead of setting a temp basal. I don't know how. I felt sick when I learned what I had done.

I immediately turned her insulin back on, tested and delivered a bolus. Then set a positive temp basal to aide the situation. It took almost four hours for me to get her BG back to where we want it and Arden was two and a half hours late for school. 

I think that it's very important that we all recognize and accept that we can't be perfect all of the time and that we are going to make mistakes. This one was just my most recent. Please try not to beat yourself up too much when something like this happens (I know you will), you're doing a great job and you're doing so under difficult circumstances. I'm very proud of you, be proud of yourself.

I pushed the wrong button.

Update

on 2013-03-19 01:43 by Scott Benner

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