Fingertips of Steel

It had been 3 days since my new friend the pump was fitted, and time to change my infusion site and cartridge. I laid out everything I needed on my kitchen table, armed with 3 pages of instructions from Animas. I was visibly nervous and needed everyone to vacate the surrounding area so I could concentrate (anyone would have thought I was performing surgery on myself or something).

But this was a big step, and I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it alone. I filled up a new cartridge with saline, and struggled a bit using the old injecting method of a syringe. Anyone who has been diabetic long enough to have once used syringes will be fine I’m sure, but I was diagnosed in 2005 and had never seen one before. It’s quite hard trying to draw out the saline without getting any air bubbles, but the trainers told me that insulin won’t be as ‘bubbly’. Five minutes and a puddle of saline later, I had successfully loaded up my new cartridge.

Injecting the saline, the'old' way

Next comes the cannula! I managed to fire it into my stomach without any hesitation, but it is quite fiddly detaching the apparatus from the skin once it has fired. I guess it will get easier the more I practise. So at this point I had my new infusion site ready to be connected to my new cartridge, but I couldn’t figure out how to remove the existing cartridge from my pump. It was stuck on really tight, and nowhere in my instructions did it tell me what to do.

The apparatus to fire the cannula

This made me even more angry and stressed. How on Earth was I supposed to do this myself if the instructions weren’t even clear? I could feel a ‘diva’ moment coming on, so I decided to just save myself an aneurism and call the support line number on the back of my pump. It was about 8.30pm, so my call was transferred to the American line.

A happy American lady answered the phone, and I explained my problem to her. She helpfully told me that I needed to leave the tube attached to the existing cannula, and that way I could just pull it out. It made sense. She stayed on the line with me until everything was sorted, and I felt much happier. It was nice knowing that advice was only a phone call away.  And when she ended the phone call with ‘Have a nice day Ma’am!’ I found myself replying ‘You too.’

So there you have it. My cannula and cartridge change wasn’t exactly stress-free, but at least I know that I can call for help should I need it. I’ll just have to make sure for now that I change my site when my phone is fully charged, with reception. Shouldn’t be too difficult... right?

Moving on and today I had to return to hospital to switch my saline for real insulin. I was a bit nervous, because now I have no safety net to fall back on. My confidence took a blow when I showed the Animas trainer the cannula I had originally fired in on Thursday. When I removed it yesterday I noticed it was bent, and wondered if that was normal. It wasn’t.

All weekend I’d had my infusion set in wrong, and had it been real insulin and not saline, I would have been in trouble. The ‘diva’ in me wanted to just throw a wobbly; I hate not getting things right first time round. But I’m human, and I have to accept that this is going to take time and lots of practise.

My blood sugars were a bit too high when I went to the hospital, 11.7*, and so I decided to test my pump out and make sure everything was connected properly this time round and do a correction. A correction is where you inject (or in my case pump) quick-acting insulin into the body to bring down low-blood sugars. Within an hour it had worked, but a bit too well. My sugars had dropped to 4.4 in a really short space of time, and anything below 4.0 is considered ‘hypo’, and needs to be treated with some fast-absorbing sugar ASAP.

The diabetic specialists tell me that I’m going to have to test my blood sugar a lot over the next few weeks to try and fine-tune my pump to my body. I really wish I had fingertips of steel, because at the rate I’m testing I don’t think I’ll have any by the end of the month.

Come back soon for more blogs on questions you wanted to ask about the pump but were too afraid to ask!

*A good blood sugar level for a diabetic is between 5 and 8