My friends and family have always complimented me for having a good memory.

What can I say? I have a knack for remembering names and faces. I’m slightly better than decent at keeping track of birthdays. And I’ve kept journals of some sort for most of my life, so I’m usually able to recall the date on which a certain event took place (or I can at least look it up fairly quickly).

But my memory can fail me sometimes, and it did just that the other day when I forgot to bolus for dinner.

To give myself a little credit, I truly thought that I had bolused. I remembered picking up my PDM and entering my blood sugar and carbohydrate information, but I never actually hit the very important “enter” button that would start delivering my insulin.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I saw my blood sugar rapidly rising – I’m talking double “up” arrows here – approximately 20 minutes after I finished my dinner.

And at first, I decided to ignore it! I thought that my insulin just needed a little more time to kick in, so I waited. And waited. And waited. But when I saw that I was rising above 250 mg/dL, I figured I should increase my temp basal…perhaps my body just needed a bit more insulin than I anticipated.

That’s when I picked up my PDM and saw that I had zero units of insulin on board. Extreme confusion turned into extreme panic as I asked my mom if I could check her PDM – what if I had picked hers up instead when I bolused for dinner and mistakenly gave her the insulin that was intended for me?!

Thankfully, that wasn’t the case, and I slowly began to piece together that I simply forgot to hit the bolus delivery button.

Whoops.

Almost one full hour after finishing my meal, I was finally delivering my mealtime bolus and silently fuming over my high blood sugar that ended up lasting several hours. It was a completely avoidable situation that shouldn’t have happened, but at least one good thing came out of it: I don’t think I’ll be forgetting to bolus any time soon.