Dealing with Type 1 diabetes is a challenge, and one of the greatest obstacles is ensuring that the equipment that acts as life support is working properly.
My son’s life relies on his proper dosage of insulin based on his carb intake and his blood glucose values. Yet, how he determines his blood glucose numbers and how he doses his insulin all relies on properly working equipment.
The equipment that my son uses 10 times a day to check his sugar is a blood glucose meter, test strips, multi-clix lancing device and lancets. We rely on the meter and the strips so much that we determine how much insulin he receives based on one particular number. If there is a hidden malfunction, a glitch somewhere inside the meter, the number may be wrong. Wrong number means wrong insulin dose, which could have dire consequences.
It is faith in our meter company that we trust the numbers that we see. Yet, they are a piece of equipment, and just as your remote for your television, they are not perfect and can malfunction within a moments notice. We just hope we catch the malfunction before it’s too late.
Then there is the insulin pump. The equipment that my son uses with regard to his insulin pump is what causes us the most stress. His pump is life support that is just like any other piece of electronics. It runs on batteries and it can break, but if your remote breaks there is no chance of anyone dying. At least not literally.
Along with the insulin pump there is the cartridge that holds the insulin on the inside. There is the tubing that connects the cartridge from inside the pump to the site that is inserted into my son’s body. The tubing is just plastic. It can crack, snag, pull, snap or spring a leak like any other plastic tube out there. Sure there are certain quality control standards that it must pass before it gets out there on the market to my son, but still, it is just a piece of plastic.
Then there is the actual cannula that gets inserted into my son’s body every 3 days by me that allows insulin into his body that is flowing from the tubing. The cannula is a hard plastic tube about 6mm long that rests just under his skin under sticky paper that we call a site. So the site sticks on the outside of his body (usually his butt) and the site is connected the cannula in his body and clips to the tubing that brings insulin from the pump.
It is these sites that are going to be the death of me. For the life of me, I cannot imagine how a tiny piece of hard plastic that is only 6mm long can actually bend in 3 separate spots inside of my son’s body to prohibit the flow of insulin. How can something so small cause so many problems? If the cannula kinks inside of my son’s body I am unable to see it with my eye. The only way I can guess if something is wrong with the cannula is when another piece of equipment, the blood glucose meter, shows a very high number. A high number such as 575 for those of you following along.
Then it is with a leap of faith that we get more pump equipment to change the site to try to get the blood glucose number back into range.
So, if Type 1 diabetes weren’t hard enough to manage with all the carb counting, high numbers, low numbers, stress numbers, exercise numbers, growing numbers and sick numbers, throw in the variables of all the equipment we use to keep my son alive it’s a wonder how we see any numbers in range at all.
I would love a cure for this rotten disease, but in the meantime I’ll take a cannula that doesn’t kink. Is that too much to ask for 2009, a piece of plastic that doesn’t kink? I surely don’t think so.