On Thursday, we got our training for the pump (finally!) Things went pretty good and so far I love the pump, and we don’t even have insulin in it yet! But I recently learned the hard way that you have to be very careful with it.

Training

It was Thursday afternoon as I was intently watching the clock in the classroom count down. I was getting picked up at 1:30 to get trained. Finally, after what seemed like ages of working on reading about electricity I finally heard the ringing of the phone on my teacher’s desk. She called me up and told me that I was getting picked up. I collected my things and headed over to the nurse’s office where my mom was. After making a few stops, we finally arrived at home around 1:55, about 5 minutes before training. I’m not going to lie, I was extremely nervous. We fought for about half of a year for this, and it was about to happen. I heard the doorbell ring, and it was none other than the trainer. We all greeted each other and sat down at the table. For the next 20 minutes, we were shown all of the different buttons, how to operate it, and what to do in emergencies. Then came a time, to load it with saline and put it on.

It was pretty intimidating, having a vial, needle, and cartridge in front of me. We had to draw the saline, get the air out of the needle, get the air out of the cartridge, and inject the saline into the cartridge. After that came the fun part, inserting the infusion set. After connecting the tubing and the cartridge, we took off the tape and plastic protector to expose a giant needle. It was a little bit scary, the giant needle about to go into me. But I kept in mind how hard we had to fight for it, and that turning back would be admitting defeat to T1D. So I took a deep breath, and “POP” the needle was in. If it wasn’t for the deafening noise it makes, I would have never noticed it went in! My dad pulled out the metal needle and all that was left was a small, slender plastic tube. The training was now complete, we said goodbye to our trainer, and hello to our new pump.

Below are some links to videos so you know what it is like inserting a set and changing a site!

Tandem Diabetes Care – How To Load a New Cartridge Onto Your Insulin Pump

 How To Insert A New AutoSoft™ 90 Insulin Pump Infusion Set

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WARNING

This morning I came to a rude awakening. I woke up and found that my infusion set had fallen out overnight! We had to insert a new infusion set right after I woke up. Doesn’t seem like too bad of an error, right? Wrong! Instead of taking long-acting insulin with the pump to lower my blood sugar throughout the day, I get short bursts of fast-acting over the day and night. So that means that I would have missed all of that insulin for the time that it was out! This could lead to high blood sugar, or the dreaded Diabetic Ketoacidosis if not handled soon enough. This is why you really have to be careful with these things! But it’s a good thing that we are now looking into some skin-tac to help it stay on overnight.

To sum it all up, so far the pump is pretty good! I can’t wait to actually put insulin in it on Thursday to end my shots once and for all.

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