This topic is easy to write about because there are so many moments to choose from... and of all the crazy stuff that has happened since type I has been in our lives, this singular moment has all of the elements of a classic blooper. It has horror, the element of surprise, uncertainty, humor and something to clean up at the end - the only thing missing is that no one got hit in the nuts with a fungo bat...
This moment happens at 1:20 am the evening that the photo above was taken and includes a blooper that pays off with comedy three times! We were packing up our stuff in a Disney hotel room to make the transfer early the next morning to a Disney cruise ship. We had just finished our last day of the park side of our park/cruise vacation - our first since Arden’s diagnosis.
When I think back on the events that led to this ‘blooper’ I identify two main factors in it’s creation. One - this was our first effort in administering insulin in a significantly hot climate and two, Arden saw a little boy with a giant popsicle on our way back to the hotel around 10 pm. Now understand, this popsicle was legendary, a foot long and twisted like a taunt, fat shoe lace and rainbow colored to boot. Arden begged for one of those popsicles and we got her one. She ate it, we injected (pre OmniPod days) and went upon our merry way.
Fast-forward to 1:20 am. Kids are sleeping in the other room and Kelly, myself and my brother Brian are stuffing our clothes into luggage, sharing old stories, fond memories and laughing the night away. It was a great few hours right up until...
The grunting screams bellowed from the other room. Now I have to give Kelly and I a bit of credit because we had already weathered a seizure from too much insulin a month or so after Arden’s diagnosis and so we immediately recognized the grunting and we leapt into action. One of us went and got Arden (Kelly if I remember) and the other got out the fast acting glucose gel.
Now I know what you’re thinking, “When the hell does this get funny?”. The answer to that question is right now.
I don’t know how many of you have navigated a low BG seizure but it’s a daunting few minutes and while I believe that you’d all be fine handling one, hind-sight may show that you weren’t exactly at your best in the moment. For me, I forgot to pull of the tab pictured on the left before I attempted to squeeze the gel from the tube. When the gel didn’t come out I didn’t do the reasonable thing and look to see why, instead I just squeezed harder. That’s when the opposite corner of the tube popped a toothpick sized hole in it’s corner.
Blooper moment number one happens as we finally notice that the corner had blown open, figuring it out when we saw the sugary gel collecting on my hand. Kelly and I made the “WTF” face at each other and then without missing a beat I flipped the tube over and used that corner to get the gel into Arden’s cheek. Had Arden not been seizing I’m 100% positive that we would have cracked up in this moment. Kelly held Arden during all of this, (she is such a rock star mom) the seizure subsided and we got Arden stable and put her back to bed. Blooper two happens moments after the seizure stopped, we turned to see my brother looking like a crazy cat caught in a trap. He was freaked out, bug eyed and spinning in what he would describe to us the next day as a, “useless circle”.
As quick as this disaster began, it ended. There was a tension in the room and it would be relived when we saw the lightning bolt esq lines of glucose gel squirted all over the hotel walls and door. I had been squeezing so hard that the gel was flying from the small hole like a laser... we laughed like a room full of mental patients upon seeing the gel on the walls and then we cleaned it up and finished packing. It’s the hardest anything diabetes related has ever made us laugh and I hope that you got a laugh from it too.
One final thought. They should make the corners of the tube out of the stuff that the tab glue is made of... and you should follow me on Twitter @ArdensDay. And while you’re here why not check out the rest of the site (I hear my post fromyesterday is quite good :)
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