So as I said in my previous post calling my diabetes problem is not really a type 2. According to the specialist I went to see this week, it’s actually much more similar to type 1, but it’s neither, and is strictly related to my pancreatitis.
Anyway the doctor put me on insulin (which I was actually expecting); this is no big deal, even though my mother started fretting as soon as she heard of it (why do I still keep her up to date? I really shouldn’t, at this point). I mean, there are kids out there managing their own insulin injection, why should I be worried about this? And it’s not like I’m scared of needles at this point.
But of course, they had to warn me about the dangers of hypoglycemia (also known as low blood sugars), and how to treat it. Since I live alone, they were even more concerned: in the (remote, given my blood sugars) chance I would have an episode of hypoglycemia, I have to rely on somebody actually checking on me. During the week it’s easy: I work at an office, so I asked my colleagues, if I don’t arrive and I’m not answering to please check on me. But what about the weekends? What about bank holidays and vacations?
Well, I started looking for an app for android to do that as that seemed to be the obvious solution to the problem. Unfortunately, I could not find anything that fits the bill as intended for me. The main problem is that most “dead man’s triggers” apps (some of which are named this way or variants thereof, are designed for a different situation: they are designed to get rid of the data on your phone if you either died or your phone got stolen or got lost, which means they got features such as password protection and wiping, but they don’t have a “call with a pre-recorded message” feature which would be much more useful to me.
Indeed, what I’m looking for is:
- scheduler: I don’t want to have to ack the trigger during the night;
- list of randomly-selected people to text or call;
- ability for the person that has been called to ack/nack the request (so that somebody else can be contacted if, say, the contact is away from the city);
- an escalation procedure so that if nobody can be reached to reach to me (and I still haven’t answered the trigger, which should keep ringing), an absolute emergency contact can be defined — in my case that would be my employer’s security office;
- a way to provide a quick broadcast of the location of the phone, so that if I’m not home somebody can actually find me.
If I don’t quickly find a solution to this I might as well just decide to write my own, but I’d rather avoid that since I have barely the time to live, lately.