My OmniPod has been working pretty wickedly for the past few weeks. I haven’t seen a morning, noon, or night “hit” number above 150 in nearly four weeks (just correction numbers), which is why I was suprised this morning to wake up at 178.
I was even more stunned to see my noon number hit 248 for no reason.
Was I getting sick or something? What the hell was going on? I realized that I’d changed the pod out yesterday, which is when the wacky numbers started (I thought I was way higher than I should have been during my 1:30am test, too).
But hey, maybe I’m just getting sick, so I just keep on keeping on. I popped down to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription.
As I walked back from the pharmacy, I stepped into the elevator and heard this high pitched whine.
That’s a weird elevator whine, I thought. It’s that high dog-whistle radio noise type whine that’s really, really annoying.
And then I had a thought.
I put my hand over my pump.
The noise lessened.
Oh, shit.
When I stepped out of the elevator, it became very clear that I was the one emitting the high pitched whine. I made a beeline to my office with my hand over the pump and grabbed my backup from my bag.
In the bathroom, I went to change out the pump with my PDM. But the PDM said it couldn’t communicate with the pod…
Which meant –
The pod kept beeping.
I peeled it off and replaced it with my backup without any issue, but…
THE POD KEPT BEEPING.
So here I am, standing in the bathroom at work, and I have this continuously beeping pager-sized device in my hand. I pulled off the adhesive backing. I pulled at the edges of the plastic backing. It wouldn’t budge.
I checked to make sure I was the only one in the bathroom.
Then I started throwing my beeping pod as hard as I could against the bathroom floor. I did this at least three times. Thank God nobody walked in on me trying to destroy a piece of medical hardware.
My next thought was to throw it in a sink full of water, but these things are waterproof up to 8 feet for 30 min. I’d have to let it soak – batteries and all – for 30 min.
These fuckers are really well made.
And here’s the deal: you can’t just throw away this beeping thing at work in a high rise building. It looks like a mini-bomb. I knew that if I tossed it and it kept beeping, there was a chance somebody was going to call in the police for bomb sweep. No, seriously. If people are willing to call the cops about half empty bottles of water left in elevators, they’re going to call about a pager-sized device beeping in a bathroom trash can.
My next thought is that I have to somehow pulverize this thing into small pieces. I need to get the fucking battery out, but I don’t have anything on my desk to hammer this thing.
So I went to the experts in demolition.
I went downstairs to the IT hardware guys.
The infrastructure manager pulled out his tools and said, “So I can destroy this, right?”
“Yes, I already replaced it.”
“So basically, I can destroy it and just tear it apart?”
“Yes. Please. It wont. stop. beeping.”
“OK, I’m going to totally destroy it then!”
“Excellent!”
He pulled out some regular pliers and some needle nosed pliers and pried off the plastic backing after a couple of tries (I told you these are well made!). Then he popped out the batteries.
The pod went blessedly silent.
It was then that he asked me, as he handed me the neatly destroyed remains, “What is this, anyway?”
“My insulin pump,” I said.
He just shook his head at me.
I mean really, what do you say to that?
