Awful for all concerned.

1 June 2010
6 Comments

I’ve done a few posts about diabetes and driving over the years. It’s a really tricky one, this topic. On the one hand I totally agree with the medical professional who taught me “Five before you drive” (as in 5mmol/l), but in reality this is not achieveable all the time, and there are going to be times when you get behind the wheel when your blood sugar is lower than that; or if you’re driving a longer distance you can have your BG plummet while you’re on the road.

This is why I was so sad when I read this article about a…

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By Nic on 1 June 2010 at 10.17 am
Posted in CGMS, Monitoring
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Texting and driving…

4 February 2010
9 Comments

…. is illegal now in NZ as we all know. However, what about bolusing and driving?

Yesterday I was in Ponsonby to have coffee with a friend. I was on my way home, sitting at the traffic lights near Three Lamps. I first of all did a BG test while I sat there. It was ever so slightly on the high side so I then reached down to my pump to program in a correction bolus.

It was at this point that I realised that I was sitting bang, smack outside the Ponsonby Police station. And a policeman was just locking up his patrol car in the carpark about 5m from where my car was sitting. Before he could…

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By Nic on 4 February 2010 at 4.33 pm
Posted in Insulin Pumps, Slice of Life
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The inconvenience of a pump.

10 September 2009
3 Comments

I mentioned in an earlier post that going on the pump is not the silver bullet we sometimes imagine it to be. It definitely requires a lot of work, and more organisation than being on MDI that’s for sure (instead of just needles and vials you’ve got a whole new array of kit you need to carry around with you: insertion sets + devices, wipes, vials of insulin, reservoirs, lines, batteries etc etc).

This morning was case in point. My pump ran out of insulin completely just as I was running out the door. I’d taken my breakfast bolus and was planning to eat my breakfast on the way in in the car. My husband was driving me in…

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By Nic on 10 September 2009 at 8.28 am
Posted in Insulin Pumps, Slice of Life
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The lancet-eating car.

13 August 2009
9 Comments

So…. I posted about ‘having a mare’ two days ago – unfortunately things didn’t get any better yesterday! I started the day with a site change which seemed to go pretty smoothly. However when I clocked a 17.7 an hour after breakfast which rose to 19.1 just 15mins later, it all turned quite quickly to mush. When I inspected the insertion I’d put in that morning I found it totally bent and twisted with no hope of delivering basal or bolus insulin. Took me another three hours to get it down to a suitable level in order to have lunch, and then for some strange, inexplicable reason I got to a 15.9 after lunch!!

By the time I’d…

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By Nic on 13 August 2009 at 8.27 am
Posted in Hypos & Hypers, Slice of Life
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Guest Blog: Sympathy Vote continued…

3 March 2009
1 Comment

I thought that my morning was bad when I woke at 13.4 and then arrived at work 45 minutes later at 6:30am to write a presentation. That said though, I had to quickly reassess because while I was doing my usual morning peruse through the headlines on The New Zealand Herald site this morning I found an article about some poor guy that has driven his Mercedes into two cars and then ended up in the front a designer clothes shop on Ponsonby Road. Cause you ask? it was (and I quote) “a diabetic attack”.

I have two points here, the first of which is that I truthfully find the term ‘diabetic attack’ quite stupid and…

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By Aaron on 3 March 2009 at 9.34 am
Posted in Hypos & Hypers
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