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Jaclyn’s totally awesome lunch.

Do you ever have days where you’re just extremely klutzy? I think I just had one of my most ridiculous hours ever.

During lunch I needed to change my infusion set for my insulin pump. (Some background: the infusion set includes the catheter you put in your skin and the tubing that runs from it to the pump. I change it every three days.) First, I take out the old one, which normally is no big occurrence, you just pull the tape off and out comes the tiny little plastic that was in your skin. Well, for whatever reason, I pull this one out and it starts gushing blood. GUSHING. It doesn’t hurt at all, but oh boy is it pouring out. I’m in my work clothes of course, so I really had to scrounge for something to mop up all the blood before it stained them. Luckily I had some napkins left over by the TV tray.

Anyway, I get that cleaned up then go to insert the new infusion set. It’s a pretty simple process: you hook the tubing to a reservoir of insulin and then place that in the pump. You prime your pump (fill the tubing with insulin), then you place the infusion set into a little device that will inject it into your skin. Well, I did all this–except one thing: I forgot to take the tape off the back of the adhesive. So I got it all inserted and even pulled the needle out of the catheter before realizing the tape was still on. Yep, so that was wasted. Had to pull it out and do it over.

Second time around, repeating entire process, I go to inject and made sure I took the tape off this time. However, I forgot to take off the cap around the needle! BRILLIANT. But luckily at least, this didn’t waste anything as it couldn’t go very far with the cap. Haha.

Next time I got it in without any issue. Finally.

Unfortunately, this is not the end of my afternoon escapades. After getting my pump settled, I needed to go check my blood sugar. When I pressed the button to eject a strip however, it gives me an error message. NEVER had that happen before. Tried changing the test strip drum first, didn’t help. Tried changing the batteries, didn’t help. Was ready to eat lunch, so I gave up for the time being and pulled out another meter that came with all my pump stuff that I decided I didn’t want to use. Checked my sugar, everything went fine, but then I dumped the little bottle of strips on the floor and they scattered everywhere.

Next I just ate my lunch, including a Boost shake, which I had opened and set out prior to all this fiasco. Well, it had been a few minutes, so I wanted to shake it up a bit again before drinking. Of course, I didn’t put the cap on very tight, so when I shook it, lots of it went flying everywhere. UGH.

After all that, I decided to figure out the problem with my meter, so I finally just dug through to the very back of my diabetes junk cabinet to get the manual for the meter to look up the error message. Turns out the little area where it reads from the meter was just dirty. I wiped it with a wet cloth and all was fine.

And that concludes the stupidest lunch hour I’ve ever had in my life.

God damn it, fucking shit crap.