I knew I wanted to write a blog post about how I forgot to change my pod last week, and I knew I wanted to give it some sort of clever title…

…so out of site, out of mind is what I came up with. After all, my pump site was completely out of sight for me, which is one reason why I forgot it.

You’d think that after being on the Omnipod for almost 7 years, I’d never forget that I have to change my pod every 3 days. But just like I sometimes forget to reply to a text message or take a load of laundry out of the dryer, it slipped my mind the other night until just before I went to bed.

That’s when I was faced with a choice: Should I change the pod right then and there before I went to sleep, or let it expire overnight and change it first thing in the morning?

There were pros and cons to each. If I changed the pod before bed, then I wouldn’t have to worry about a screaming pod waking me up in the wee hours of the morning (well, I would if it failed, but the chances of that happening were small). But if I waited until the morning, I would ensure that the 30+ units of insulin still left in the pod would get used up as much as possible. It would also mean that I could push back my regular pod change by one whole day, which sounded appealing – until I remembered that it would mean that I’d have to change my pod on a Saturday when I’m double-hosting family, then friends, at my home.

So I sucked it up and changed my pod before going to sleep, knowing that in an hour and a half it would go off to remind me to check my blood sugar (to make sure that the pod was functioning properly), but feeling okay about this because I’d much rather deal with a gentle reminder over an aggressive malfunction alarm.

Now to the whole reason why I decided to share this seemingly insignificant anecdote in the first place: This is just one diabetes-related decision that I had to make on this particular day. I can’t even tell you how many other choices I had to make prior to this concerning which foods I ate, how much insulin I took, when I exercised, when I ate my meals, and so forth.

Diabetes is a disease defined by decisions. Fortunately, this one about when to change my pod was an easier one to make…but unfortunately, there are many others that are much more difficult. And I think all people with diabetes deserve goddamn decision-making trophies because of the funny conundrum of having no choice but to live life by making decisions.