Friday 11 October 2013

Hotels and things I've learnt

This week, I had a training course in a hotel.  Turns out it was a very nice hotel and this meant nice food and drink, and lots of it. Time for some self discipline!  This was also to prove to be my biggest test with the pump so far with variable size portions and things made with probably way more sugar than would be done at home.

The first day I was running a bit high, but the second day I was pretty much where I wanted to be.

This did mean a lot of tests though, 17 over the 32 hours I was at the hotel!  Still it's all good practice and having the pump certainly made things much, much easier than pens and injections!


Now, there are lots of things you get taught when you go onto a pump and lots of things you find out for yourself, here's some of the things I've found during my journey......


  • An 80cm infusion set tube is just long enough that when you go to the loo and sit down, you don't have to unclip  the pump from your belt or remove from a pocket.
  • You really need to check that a cannula loaded into the insertion device is properly in place as, if not they can get jettisoned from it pretty much spontaneously.  Obviously they will then fire themselves, needle first, at the closest person, then stick themselves to the floor!
  • I'm a hairy chap and pulling the cannula and the sticky pad bit off takes a chunk of hair with it.  However, this isn't as bad as the itching from hair regrowth if you shave the hair off before putting a cannula in.
  • Guitar plectrums make an ideal tool for prising hairs trapped under the sticky cannula pad out.  If you leave them, they tend to 'tug' when you move about.
  • If the pump extracts itself from a clip / pocket, the tube is strong enough to keep the pump attached and will swing away quite happily without incident
  • Bubbles can seemingly appear from nowhere - it really is worth checking for these regularly

I'm still getting lots of questions, the most common at the moment is 'does it do everything automatically then?'  Well, no it doesn't, which seems to confuse most people, but I don't mind.

This weekend, it's Friday, and I have the day off, so it's the weekend already for me :o), brings a trip to Wembley for the England game, a seemingly full day at work on Saturday (arse!), another gig and, seemingly, a lot of rain.

But first, a trip to my GP who seems to be somewhat confused with a minor prescription change - I need my insulin in vials, not pen cartridges now.  This seems to have completely baffled them and I need to go in as a letter from the hospital and me writing 'Humalog insulin vial' on the repeat prescription is apparently 'not enough information'.  After all the changes I've made going onto the pump, I really didn't expect this to be one of the challenges!

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