Judging by the title of this blog post, you might assume that I’m rewriting yet another Christmas song to make it about diabetes. Well, I’m here to tell you that is false – no more Christmas carol transformations for me! (At least, not until Christmas 2019.)

Rather, this post is all about an odd, kind of silly thing that happened to my mother and I when we were out on a walk with Clarence, my parents’ dog.

We both heard a high-pitched beeping coming from…somewhere.

We exchanged glances and my mom asked me if I heard that sound. I nodded, and we both sighed as we fished through our pockets for our PDMs. That’s because we both just knew that one of us was experiencing a pod failure, and that the pressing of a couple buttons would reveal who was about to become extremely annoyed.

But both of our PDMs indicated that our pods were working just fine. Bemused, she told me that sometimes her PDM won’t recognize the pod failure right away, and it will be the pod itself that emits the beep-of-dread. So I started lifting up layers of my heavy winter clothing to see if my pod was making the sound, while she briefly stopped walking to listen closer to her pod.

After our careful scrutiny, we determined that…

…the beeping sound was actually someone using a weed whacker or some other piece of lawn-care equipment in the distance. Oops.

We continued our walk, chuckling a bit about it while Clarence pranced along in between us. It was a relief to know that we wouldn’t have to scramble home so one of us could take out insulin and a fresh pod to apply as soon as possible.

What’s the point of sharing this little vignette? To show that diabetes is such a significant part of our lives, always one of our first thoughts, even in the most mundane cases. It also illustrates how volatile diabetes can be – just like that, a random beep can change the course of the day and determine your next series of actions.

Just some food for thought, all triggered by a (literally) false alarm.