Wrong Button
Tuesday, March 12, 2013 at 11:15AM 
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.
Scott Benner
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Reader Comments (2)
I've been doing that trick a lot lately -- shutting off the basal for 30 or 60 minutes to raise my BG before reaching the point where I need to treat it with food. And by "shutting off", I mean doing the same thing you do -- set the temporary basal to zero percent.
Of course, when setting a temp. basal, the pump starts at 100% and I scroll down to zero. One extra tap of the button and it wraps around to 200% (this usually happens, as I tend to hold the button rather than press it 100 times, meaning I pass it and need to reverse-direction to scroll back). Realizing how close NO-BASAL is from DOUBLE-BASAL is really an eye-opener! Definitely something to be cautious of.
My daughter has been on the pump for less than 3 weeks. I'm going in at 12am and 3 am to test. One night (morning really), in an attempt to turn on the back light of the pump, I almost bolused her for 200 carbs. I turn the lamp on in the room each night now instead.
I like how you post both the good and the bad, it shows we're all human.