Monday, February 14, 2011

The eleventh clue

So in my last post, I talked all about the ten clues that your insulin might be going bad.  On the way home friday, I stopped at the pharmacy and exchanged two dead bottles (both different lot #s, btw) for fresh ones.  Bottle #3, which had misbehaved at my first meal after opening, had settled down and seemed to work fine, and was yet another lot # from the others.

Remember how I mentioned that once your brain is in diabetes overload, and things seem to be "fixed", it turns off?  Well, guess what?  Mine has been in troubleshooting mode for over two weeks, and so this morning I woke up to:


  • clue #11 - ketones - yup, sometimes it all slips by you until you wake with a 350 point rise overnight, moderate ketones, and feeling like Indy's stunt double after the dragged-behind-a-truck-by-your-bullwhip scene.  Nothing left to do but break out the syringe, yet another bottle of insulin, chug a gallon of water to try to flush things out, call in sick to work, and hope that things will be better tomorrow.


g'night all.

PS - I did decide to swipe the red-bearded Viking setup from Number Three Son, and keep that on the current bottle on my dresser, because every time I look at it I crack up.

1 comment:

Kelly Booth said...

I looked at your blog last night to pull up the article you did about Apidra before and saw you had a new article about the Apidra problem. My problems have continued also. I know when I read your first article, it seemed like the insulin was dying out at about the same time frame for both of us. I find it interesting that you are now having inconsistencies in the number of days also – that happened to me for the first time last week also. I had been getting 10 days out of it but one died at about day 7 or 8 last week. I don’t go thru a full vial in 10 days so I am getting really annoyed, not to mention the fact that there is no reason for my BS to have to take these kinds of hits.

After I realized it was the Apidra, I did not change my site but would toss the cartridge & open a new vial – that always did the trick and I know for sure it was not a bad site.

My pump died on Sunday and I had to go back to MDI. I had an unopened box of the Apidra SoloStar pens in the fridge that I got in Jan. As soon as I started using a pen out that box, my BS shot up and I couldn’t get it down. I decided to try using a syringe to get the insulin out of the vial and my BS came back down – now I have a whole box of bad pens!

I really like Apidra over the other fast actings but not sure if this is worth the aggrevation. Sanofi Aventis also makes Lantus and I have heard about that dying early also so they obviously have something wrong. I live in Ebensburg, PA so I can’t imagine that our pharmacies use the same distributor!