The theater of life

Tragedies are good theater. So are comedies. Unless it’s your life, then you just want to tell the playwright to sod off.


Dateline: 1718 hours (that’s 5:18 p.m.) yesterday:
Motor Error.


No, no, no. You didn’t accidently log on to a permalink to an older post. Pump Redux II, the third one to come stay with my family, is… well… is being a big butt-head like her sisters, that’s what.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking maybe I got a bad batch of reservoirs. Maybe instead of whatever grease is used in them, someone on the assembly line used superglue instead. Good thinking. But wrong. First off, if the stupid things were just plumb stuck, I’d be writing about this on a netbook borrowed from an ICU nurse, rather than comfortably pounding away on my better-than-sex-as-I-remember-it Logitech Wave keyboard in my library. And of course that would require the two boxes of reservoirs I’ve had to have been from the same lot, too.

Actually… I wonder if the old box is still in the trash? Hold on…

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Oh, that is so foul… I can’t believe how quickly trash turns into compost! Augh. But I found the box. I’ll spare you the details. The lot number is H8108546. But after that little episode of dumpster diving, I realize that this is the box from yesterday. When I opened the box, all the reservoirs fell out on the floor like a long ribbon of machine gun bullets or string cheese, so I threw the whole chain of perforated individually wrapped critters back in my diabetes supply cabinet and chucked the box in the trash (skinny boxes are hard to re-fill).

So we know the lot number of the reservoir that was in the chamber when the pump failed to fire yesterday, but we don’t know which lot was in New Pump and New Pump Redux. But… wait, wait, wait. I always carry two spare reservoirs and two spare infusion sets in my Go Bag (and good thing, too, lately). I can check their lot numbers. They’d be from the first box. I’m 90% sure of that.

Well… maybe 80% sure.

60%?

Hold on…

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At any rate, there’re also H8108546. Which makes sense, I guess. The folks at Med-T would most likely just have grabbed two boxes off the shelf when they sent them to me. What’re the odds you’d get two boxes from two different lots?

Anyway, by now I’m feeling a little like a cat on a hot tin roof, waiting for the next error. I guess we’ll wait and see what tomorrow holds… In the meantime, I’m going to do some more research to try and get to the bottom of the No Delivery vs. the Motor Error alarms. What’s what. What might be my fault, what might be the fault of the infusion set, what might be the fault of the damn pump, and what might just be damn bad luck.

I’ll let you know what I learn tomorrow.