Alarm Fatigue
Alarm fatigue is a real thing; the desensitization of sounds when exposed to an excessive amount of alarms. Nurses and doctors are at risk, and in a family of 3 people with diabetes the Aikmans are also at risk. Alarms for low blood sugars, alarms for insulin deliveries, alarms for sensor errors, alarms for basal suspensions. And then there’s all the other alarms, like text alerts and phone calls, Instagram pings, and important news updates. All the alarms are like an incessant toddler poking me in the ribs: look at me look at me look at me.
I love the idea of throwing away my smartphone and going back to a flip phone. I’m bombarded by technology. And I really miss my old rotary phone and tape deck boombox. I miss the idea of going out and being “unreachable by phone”.
In all honesty, I think technology is pretty amazing and without it I’d be a wreck. For someone who loves the quiet as much as I do, my phone is constantly by my side. It’s on my nightstand (with volume on high) while I sleep, it’s on the passenger seat while I’m driving, and my AppleWatch (with phone capabilities) is on my wrist while I teach. This technology is my kids’ lifeline, and because of that it’s my lifeline too. All these alarms and pings and pokes keep my kids safe. No flip phone for me.
Just last week Oliver got his new pump, the Medtronic 670g. It’s pretty incredible, and all the flip phones in the world can’t match up. This new pump communicates with his new CGM (continuous glucose monitor), and ups the insulin dose if his blood sugar is going high, or lowers the insulin delivery if his blood sugar is dropping. Even the basal delivery, that constant drip of insulin that is always in the background, is adjusted to his specific needs based on his trends from the past 6 days. Thank god for smart people inventing smart machines.
I’ve always been aware of alarm fatigue, I remember reading about it during my Psych 101 class in college, but I kind of forgot about it until the nurse assisting us with setting up Ollie’s pump made mention of it again. She wanted to make sure we didn’t set too many alarms for Ollie to respond to, for fear he ignore the really important ones. And then I remembered why I’ve tried hard to silence the white noise in my life.
So how do we navigate this dilemma? We rely on this technology for the safety and better management of my family’s care, but we need to stay sane in the process. It can feel at times like an assault on our senses, all these alarms. If I allow every alarm to go off and alert me to something really important, I’m at risk of alarm fatigue. This is why I pick and choose the alarms I allow into my life. Low blood sugar alarms are always left on, and urgent lows are set at an extra loud, extra annoying level. These are life and death. CGM alarms alerting us to a quick drop in blood sugar are also left on, because if we can intercept these falls we can avoid those other urgent alarms. But the high alarms we have chosen to shut off. Yes, high blood sugar is dangerous and needs to be addressed, but for the sake of our sanity (remember: 3 people with 3 separate sets of alarms) we silence these alarms. I have their “high alarm” set in the 300s, usually these highs only happen when we’ve forgotten to bolus or there’s an issue with the pump, and these are all things we would need to address quickly. My alarm clock is always set to alarm at 2am, for the night time check. If there’s an issue with either of their pumps, a 2am check-in assures they will wake in the morning. And my text messages are never silenced, especially during the school and work hours. If either of the kids or Marshall, or school nurse or Marshall’s co-workers, needed to get ahold of me I need to be sure I can be reached.
That means email alarms are always silenced and thus rarely returned, social media pings never reach me, and I should never be the one to ask for breaking news…I never get the alerts. It’s not that I don’t care, I’m simply assuring I can always hear the really important alarms, those life and death alarms.
