This Robot Life

7 April 2021

Now that I’m part robot I’ve never felt more like, what I can only assume, a regular person feels like. Odd, I know. But I don’t care that it took a tiny device to make me feel functional. After over 30,000 injections, including five a day most recently, I took the plunge. I tried an insulin pump. Good fucking god. The grass is greener on the other side. Not only is the grass greener, but it’s filled with flowers, butterflies, sunshine, a cool breeze coming off the waves, and anything else that sounds splendid. It’s kick you in the ass fantastic.

I’m an old school diabetic. In the early days I used a now outdated insulin system. Two shots a day. I had to eat at the same time and only eat the allotted amount of carbohydrates decided hours before. It was a rigid system, but an improvement to what people had to do before this “breakthrough.” Luckily, I wasn’t born yet for the earlier version. I had to poke my fingers to determine the sugar level in my blood. My callused fingers looked as if I was a child guitar prodigy. Just to be clear, I wasn’t one, never would be one, but my fingers looked the part. 

In high school insulin improved again. I had a quick acting insulin that could be taken before meals and a long term insulin that was taken once a day. It was a game changer. Now I was injecting myself in the bathroom stall at school before lunch. It was lengthening the leash inch by inch closer to food freedom. It also meant that if I wanted to eat pizza at ten at night, while at a sleepover, I didn’t just have to sit there and watch my friends eat. I could shoot up some insulin and eat too. Crazy cool.

A vial of insulin and fresh needles were my constant companions. I didn’t leave the house without them. It would be like leaving the house without wearing pants. Good news came a few months ago that Cigna, my insurance company, was finally covering the cost of the OmniPod Dash, an insulin pump that is waterproof, small, and gets replaced every three days. Dash changed my entire damn life. Now, I had a pancreas clinging to my skin with adhesive that delivered insulin whenever I told it to do so. 

About a year ago my doctor told me about Dexcom. Dex, as I affectionately refer to her, is a continuous glucose monitor. This means that instead of poking my finger before every shot, I simply insert a little device into my arm or stomach once every ten days and it sends my phone a blood sugar reading every five minutes through bluetooth. At the time this was the coolest thing to ever happen to me. Yes, it might sound a little sad, but it was the first time I knew what was happening inside my own body in real time. 

Dex gives me a heads up when my blood sugar is plummeting at the speed of light. It’s nice to have a little warning before I start to feel a low blood sugar. Sure, I’m still a sweaty, shaky mess of a human when it hits full on. I can’t hold a single thought, I breath like I’m in the midst of a panic attack, my vision goes blurry and I can’t walk in a strait line. All that hasn’t changed, but it is refreshing that this device acts like a shadow of my blood sugar, always watching and notifying me what’s going on.

Dex and Dash have made my life easier than I ever knew it could be. Together, they do all the work, even the math. In our first days together, I worried that I’d awaken and all of this would have been a dream. I’d realize the technology hadn’t been invented yet, and I’d be a hands on diabetic once again. My purse would be littered with insulin vials and syringes. The old ball and chain were back. These are actual thoughts I had in those early days. Sometimes I’d notice I’d be smiling and I didn’t know why. This happened often. I was insanely happy with my new robot bits.

Well the honeymoon officially ended. Dash has shown me his true colors. I’d be lying if I said wasn’t disappointed and frustrated by his behavior the last couple of weeks. I guess the good times can’t last forever, no matter how much I willed them. I get that I am still diabetic, and always will be. Dash can’t fix that. I know that’s not possible. After thirty one blissful years of being diabetic I am fully aware that this little device inserted into my stomach isn’t a miracle worker. And even though he’s been messing up more than ever, my life with him is still one thousand times better than it was before he was around. 

My hands shook and fumbled with the small, yet very expensive devices every time I inserted a new one. I was so worried I would break each new device I inserted for at least the first month. Somehow I was convinced that I would mess it up and have to discard the new pump before its expiration three days later. If that were to happen I would literally be throwing a shit ton of money into the trash. In terms of finances, I’m more of a peasant than a wealthy person, so that would be a tragedy. Turns out this high tech equipment doesn’t need my help to peter out. It can do that all on its own.

Did I mention how much my robotic pancreas costs? Before my deductible was met, it cost close to $900 for a one month supply. After my deductible was met it cost $350 for a one month supply. Once my out of pocket maximum is met, I’ll have no copay. I’m in the home stretch now. Soon it will be so long copays! Insurance is such a rigged system. I’ve decided not to let myself explode every time I make a trip to the pharmacy. I’ve figured out how to play their game, maybe not as good as the greedy CEOs of insurance companies, but well enough to know how to work their sick system any way I can.

So anyway, things went south last week. It all started with an alarm going off around 11PM. I was mostly asleep and couldn’t figure out where this ear piercing alarm was coming from. Finally, I realized it was coming from me. I was like a bomb going off. My device told me the insulin delivery was suspended and I needed to change the pod immediately. That’s funny, I thought. I had just put a new Dash in that morning. I fumbled around and managed to remove the device. As soon as I lifted it out of my stomach blood squirted out of the insertion hole. Im not exaggerating here. It looked like a scene in a slasher movie. 

A couple of days later my blood sugar skyrocketed. I had a Dash in place and it claimed it was working, but I couldn’t get those numbers to go down to normal. This lasted two days. After having a headache and feeling like shit with my blood sugar off the charts, I decided I needed to change the pod early. I put a new Dash in and the same thing kept happening. For five days my blood sugars were all over the place and I was about to lose my wits. Not to mention these defective devices were burning a real big hole in my pocket.

I don’t know if it was because my game changing devices were giving me a hard time, or I had to refrain from kicking my boss in the balls multiple times that week for being a passive aggressive asshole, or because my stress and anxiety levels were competing for first place, but I started to have an anxiety attack in a Barnes & Noble. I decided maybe it would help to find a book about how to be better at diabetes and perhaps something with an instruction manual on insulin pumps wouldn’t hurt either. In the medical section, I found the extensive collection of books on diabetes. After perusing the shelves, I literally found one book for type 1 diabetics. I was incensed. I was already jealous that type 2 diabetics had pancreases that hadn’t fully kicked the bucket. Now they had hundreds of book options for their ailment and I had one. Hmm. I guess life really isn’t fair sometimes. 

Before I got my shit together, bought my book and left the store, I got a text from my roommate that a loud sound was coming from my room. When I opened the door of my house I walked into a piercing incessant sound. I ran downstairs and searched around for the sound. It was coming from the garbage. One of my old expired Dashes was the source. I called the customer service number on the box and explained to Destiny, a very patient lady, my situation. She could hear the little shit through the phone. She spent 15 minutes telling me to insert a paperclip through a near invisible hole on the back of the device to shut the sound off. I couldn’t find a paper clip and I couldn’t find the hole. It was at this moment my blood sugar decided to drop rapidly. I asked Destiny if there were any other options before we both lost our minds. She told me to take a hammer to it. I did. It was the best I’d felt all week.

After my own version of the Office Space scene where they take hammers to the copier and printer machine, I got back to business with Destiny. Just as we were going through product numbers to see if I could be reimbursed for any of the problematic devices, we lost connection and I couldn’t reach her again. Fuck. I wanted to cry. I’m guessing she was relieved the connection cut our call short.

Could anything else go wrong this week? Something else did go wrong, because something else can always go wrong. A pod that had been working a few days later, detached from my arm where it was inserted. It dangled from my arm like an ornament. When I removed the adhesive my arm looked like it got in a fight with a wire fence and lost. Later, the detached Dash woke me in the middle of the night. At 3 AM I found myself, again, wielding a hammer and beating the daylights out of another insulin pump.

A string of bad luck is annoying. But when part of that bad luck involves how your body functions and feels it sucks even more. It’s strange going from feeling elated about your insulin pumps to literally beating the shit out of them. When Dash came into my life, it really was the greatest thing. It still is. My quality of life went through the roof. I never knew life could be like this. So much simpler with two technological advances. Sure, I feel a little robotic, but it’s the closest  I’ll ever get to not have the burden of constantly picking up the slack of a down and out organ. These little devices mimic what my body should be doing if it was normal. It’s as close as I’m gonna get. I’ll take it. Even if it breaks the bank, my skin goes through hell and I have to keep a hammer around for all the naughty Dashes in the trash can. It’s totally worth it.