Middle school teacher destroys student's insulin pump thinking it was headphones.

A young man shared a story from middle school that seems straight out of a nightmare. Frustrated teachers sometimes go hard on power trips, and they can range from annoying to deadly.

My teacher cut the tube for my insulin pump because we couldn’t have headphones in class

Wundereley writes:

This happened when I was in middle school, you know, back in the days of wired headphones so about 2011 or something.

I’ve (24M currently) been a type 1 diabetic since I was about four years old and I use a continuous glucose monitor and an insulin pump, I had an IEP so all my teachers were told about it and that I would need my insulin pump in class, that it might make noise and I might have to pull it out of my pocket and mess with it if I needed insulin, or I might need to drink a juice pouch, and I was able to do so at my discretion.

We had one teacher who was a complete hard *ss for no reason. She was notorious for making kids cry during presentations, she even told one girl who wanted to be a doctor to find a cure for cancer (because her little sister had childhood cancer) that she would need to “actually be smart” to do that while chuckling to herself. Let a kid dream man, we were like 12 years old.

As you can imagine she was also at war with technology, and on a side note, these days I use my phone to check my glucose and give myself an insulin bolus. I can’t imagine being a kid today and dealing with a teacher like that when the lines are blurred and your smart phone actually is a life saving medical device.

But anyway, if you’re not familiar with insulin pumps, the kind I use has a little tube that connects the pump which has the insulin to my body which needs the insulin.

This teacher also liked to be weirdly obtuse about things. Instead of being like other teachers and simply saying something like, “no cell phones in class, put it on my desk,” which would allow me to remind them it’s an insulin pump and they’d usually say something like, “that’s right, my bad,” she would instead try and talk abstractly about what she wanted to happen while walking around the room.

So this particular day she kept alluding to students listening to music in class, that you should be careful what you do because she can see it, that us kids think we’re so sneaky but the adults know what we’re up to. I obviously wasn’t listening to music so I figured she’d seen someone with headphones in the room, and the next thing I know she had snuck up behind me with scissors.

It took me a good moment to realize what exactly had happened because I was astonished. I was used to teachers thinking I had a cell phone, or getting upset about my pump beeping during an exam, but no one had ever touched it before much less cut my life sustaining tube!

I was actually sitting with my mouth agape and she turned to me, now that she was at the front of the class again, and said something along the lines of, “Mr. Wundereley, care to share what tunes are more important than listening to class?”

I’d at this point put together that she thought I was listening to music, she thought she cut my headphone wires. I replied, “just the sound of my thoughts while I’ve still got any, since that was my insulin pump.”

She had to let me go to my locker to get my cell phone to call my mom to bring me a new infusion set (my parents insisted no cell phones until high school, but my mom was also scared with me being T1D and too dyslexic to remember a phone number and wanted me to easily be able to call her so she got me a $15 Walmart phone and put minutes on it… and now I feel old).

Then I just waited in the front office for her, she worked from home and drove like a bat out of h*ll. She was so angry, I don’t ever want to see her that angry again in my life, it took ten years off of me and I wasn’t even in trouble. The teacher had apologies to me and all the teachers got some more disability accommodation training or something.

Holy moly. Redditors had a lot to say about this...

Scoutser says:

Honestly, she should have been fired even if it were headphones. Destroying students' property is not something a teacher should do under any circumstances.

pinkpineapples007 agrees:

She literally destroyed a medical device. Like I know it was fixable but what if it wasn’t? And with the healthcare costs in America. My moms a Type I Diabetic and as a kid she couldn’t even go to over night camps or anything bc there was just too much risk back then.

Like school is supposed to be safe enough to learn in. Even if it was headphones, that’s destruction of property. I hope that woman steps on a Lego every few days for the rest of her life.

Soap_on_Gfuel speaks from experience:

Man, she should've been fired in the spot. Like I had a SNA (Special Needs Assistant) who wouldn't let me do my insullin at lunch and my Mum got her fired after 10 minutes with the principal.

Later, OP added:

In terms of her her apology, it wasn't too bad. We had a meeting with her, the principal, assistant principal and a lady from the special education office, plus me and my parents. She said she was sorry for her actions and that she shouldn't have treated me that way and she hopes I don't grow up to expect people to act like that towards me.

She forgot I had a pump but I didn't feel like she was making an excuse, she was saying she should have been more mindful and it was her fault and that I did nothing wrong. She also said I was brave and calm in the face of adversity. Stuff like that. And then she apologized to my mom and dad for frightening them and for any costs, she offered to pay for it but they declined.

They wanted all the teachers to get more education about kids with diabetes and the school had like a nurse diabetes educator or someone come in to talk to the teachers. No, my parents didn’t sue her or the school. No, she wasn’t fired. Yes I still had to be in her class. And yes, I did have extra supplies kept in the nurse's office, but I also just really wanted my mom in that moment because I was a kid.

This was a tiny school and did a lot of backwards things, they mishandled my learning disability as well, and one year one of my teachers was surprised my dad has (mild) cerebral palsy and thought it must be “so tough” for me “having to deal with that” and would talk to him like he was five during student teacher conferences. He’s an engineer.

Rstng_Wltschmrz_Face says:

I think I probably would've nicely asked the police if they'd like to come and arrest someone who just intentionally tried to kill my child.

Corfiz74 asks:

Did you at least get to see the look on her face when the awful realization hit of what she had just done?

And OP replies:

She looked like what dial-up sounds like.