I’m sorry that your vacation had complications due to your PDM failure and your iPhone failure. Based on your numbers posted, it looks like you prevailed and still managed much better bg control than lots of people can boast!
Maybe I’ve had better PDM luck than others, but I’ve had one dead lithium back up battery and I dropped one in my dog’s water bowl. I do take a spare PDM anytime I am more than a few hours from home. That’s my personal preference for ease of managing “life” that happens with life support devices. But you’ve demonstrated that you can do quite well with just a syringe if you have to!
I’ve expressed my thoughts on the implicit limitations when using medical devices in other threads. As an example:
If I’m going anywhere away from home for several days, I’m taking my Dexcom receiver as a back up and a spare PDM. I never am so limited in packing space as to not include those things. I can understand people not wanting to do that, but the more sophisticated we make our daily care, the more failure points we introduce. I think that’s just what comes with the territory. Maybe the PDMs could be more robust, or more sophisticated, or integrated with something else…but I appreciate the tubeless pods and work with it in a way that works for me.