4 am Scavenger Hunt
Monday, July 29, 2013 at 11:28AM
Scott Benner in Caregiver, Daddy's Blog, DexCom, OmniPod, diabetes, type I

I'm not embarrassed to tell you that more than a few times a year I fall sound to sleep on our sofa while trying to watch television at night. I am however embarrassed to admit that a handful of those times I am so stone cold tired that my wife can't wake me up to go to bed. This is apparently my signal to Kelly that I need a night off from BG patrol and she always, no matter how tired she may be, picks up the reigns and carries on.

One thing these nights seem to have in common, I always wake up a bit disoriented around 4 am, usually with pillows pilled on top of me acting as a blanket. 

Last week when this happened to me I woke on schedule around 4 am, stumble to the second floor and went directly to Arden's room to check on her. I picked up her DexCom, saw that she needed a small temp basal and reached for her bag but it wasn't where I expected it to be. I found my phone, realized I didn't have a flashlight app and proceeded to download one from the App Store.

This is the exact moment when all of this would get funny

There I was standing in the doorway of Arden's room, leisurely browsing the flashlight apps because I didn't want to download one that I would regret later - which is of course ridiculous. My hair was standing straight up, my shorts were twisted about 180º counterclockwise around my waist and I was incredibly thirsty, but in my exhausted daze I couldn't let go of the feeling that I didn't want to download an inferior flashlight app. This process took a few minutes and then I set out, armed with my new flashlight, to find Arden's bag that holds her OmniPod PDM, MultiClix lance, test strips and all of the rest. 

I quick scan told me that it wasn't in her room, "must be with Kelly" I thought. It wasn't. So I headed back to the first floor where I finally found Arden's bag under a pillow on a chair in our living room. I walked back upstairs, opened the bag and found that it only contained test strips. I laughed to myself and I made my way back downstairs. I won't bore you with every detail of the next twenty minutes but sufficed to say that the contents belonging in that bag could not have been more spread out throughout our home. 

Our poor dog Indy looked quite cross when I finally gave up on my new flashlight app and turned on all of the lights in the living room.  When I finally set the temp basal rate and went to crawl into my bed, I realized that I never folded the laundry that I put on the bed earlier in the day. One more trip around the second floor netted me a laundry basket large enough to hold the clean clothes... and I was finally off to dreamland. 

If only I wasn't wide awake from my scavenger hunt...

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