On her blog, game writer Laura Michet describes what happened when her insulin pump, a Tandem t:slim X2, started failing once or twice a day in the middle of a Santa Fe vacation. She has type 1 diabetes and has worn a pump for 25 years without one ever quitting on her. She spent the rest of the trip driving the Southwest with a cooler of insulin, never more than an hour from an ER — then found that no pharmacy from Flagstaff to Los Angeles could fill her backup prescription.
The people who make these machines, she writes, are "both keeping me alive and also my mortal enemies." The part that scared her most wasn't the hardware: "The fact that nobody could get me the damn insulin once I had the prescription is possibly even more frightening to me than the pump failure." Underneath all of it, she writes, "something is always screaming: it's fucking stupid that I have to do this at all."
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