Ad hoc

In the beginning of 2002, things were finally falling into place. We had the pump and had meetings with our endocrinologist about the start up. She is a highly qualified diabetes expert but Emilie was to be her first patient using an insulin pump.

As mentioned above, we had done some of the homework ourselves working with the book ‘Pumping Insulin …’. Being an American book, of course everything was in American units so we had been translating the essential chapters and converting some of the tables and formulas into a spreadsheet with European units. We wanted to have clean and simple tools at hand.

We felt a bit like pioneers so we probably were more thorough in our preparations than ‘ordinary’ parents at a clinic with CSII experience would be. One of us wore a pump with saline solution for a couple of days to test the sensation of the 6 mm 90 degree steel needle we had been recommended.

Emilie herself tried sleeping with the pump without having a needle in her stomach but with the tubing taped onto her skin. She is a very restless sleeper and one of our worries was if she could sleep through a night without being tangled in the tubing and disconnecting the needle. That seemed to work out well …

Then we tried connecting the pump to Emilie with saline instead of insulin. The purpose was to see how she would react to the needle – and we were happy that we did this test before the real kick off, because it turned out to be a total failure! Putting the needle – a type called Rapid-D – into place was not the problem. She did that herself without hesitation. But within an hour, she was crying with pain. It hurt her, so of course we took it off.

That was an unpleasant surprise – but it meant that we could ensure, that some other kind of needle would be available for the real pump start: A type called the Tender Teflon needle. We tried that ourselves, too, and was a bit uneasy about the 17 mm long, angled needle and the more complicated insertion technique – but we tried it.

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