Disconnected!

While the title of this post could easily refer to the fact that I have been AWOL from the blogoshpere for longer than I’d care to calculate, surprisingly enough, it has nothing to do with my lack of prolificacy.  Instead, it has to do with a matter of troubling mystery — the scary truth of the fact that, when it comes to diabetes, “I’ve been doing it so long, I could do it in my sleep!”

Being of a “hang loose” mentality, I don’t usually think too much about my pump when I sleep.  I don’t place it under my pillow or clip it to my pajamas or have a special pocket in which it can snuggle up safely.  Sometimes, I wake to find my waist lassoed by tubing and I need to carry out the awkward “shift and roll” maneuver to free myself from its boa-esque grip.  A few mornings, I have woken up to a tugging sensation at my infusion site and found my pump dangling helplessly off the side of the bed (as if it thought getting away would be that easy! ha!).  But, all in all, sleeping with the pump is extremely uneventful.  I sleep.  It lays beside me on the mattress.  I wake.  It gets clipped to my waistband or stored in my pocket.  Repeat.  Repeat.  Repeat.

However, a few nights ago, I awoke to a situation I hadn’t yet experienced since I started pumping back in April.  It was four in the morning, my skin was hot to the touch, my blankets were in disarray and I had that telltale feeling of unquenchable thirst.  I propped myself up on one arm as I reached for the glass of water that sat on my bedside table.  Within seconds, I had downed a full pint of water.  Even without testing, I knew my blood sugar was far higher than it should be.

In the dark, half-asleep, I clumsily grasped for my pump on the mattress beside me before I got up to go to the bathroom.  (Middle of the night bathroom visits? Another telltale sign of high blood glucose).  I ran my hands around my waist, fumbling for the familiar feel of tubing.  Not having any luck, I searched my stomach for my infusion site, figuring I would follow the tubing from its source to my seemingly vanished pump.  When my fingers finally found the infusion set on the right side of my abdomen, I immediately knew something was wrong.  I was disconnected.  My pump was not attached.

Instantly awake, panic rose within me about the state of my blood sugar.  How long had I been disconnected?  And how could it have possibly happened?  In a flash, I turned on my bedside light and there, on my nightstand, sitting nicely with its tubing carefully wrapped around its green casing, was my pump — completely unaffected by this 4am fiasco.  I grabbed it.  I clipped it to my belly.  And then, I grabbed my meter.

5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

High, as expected.  But, not as high as I had been preparing to see.  Six hours earlier, I had gone to bed with a reading of 6.5mmol/L.  Now, at 4am, my sugar clocked in at 14.5.  As my tired brain tried to process what had happened, I realized that I must have disconnected myself while I was sleeping, probably only two or three hours before my thirst and elevated body temperature had awakened me.  If I had been disconnected since getting into bed, my blood sugar would have skyrocketed far beyond the 14.5 mark.

What frightens me is that I have absolutely no recollection of disconnecting my pump.  Was I dreaming that I was preparing to have a shower?  Or that there was an air bubble in my tubing that needed to be primed out?  I have no idea.  Absolutely no idea.

And that scares me.

What about you, my PWD friends?  Has anything similar ever happened to you?