Recently it was time to change my pump reservoir, and I realised I’d set a new personal record. The insulin had been in my Accu-Chek Combo pump for 8.5 days! The reservoir in my pump can hold 3.15 ml of insulin. Currently I usually fill it with between 300-305U of Humalog from a pen cartridge. …
For a person with type 1 diabetes, having access to your insulin is critical. If you don’t get your next injections (multiple each day) or your pump runs dry, you’re going to have an emergency on your hands. If your supply at home has run out or spoiled, in Australia we have quite good pharmaceutical …
This article isn’t about fancy new technology. But it is about an issue which should be important to everyone who has to inject insulin. We’re lucky in Australia that we get access to this life-saving drug. So many children in the world DIE because they don’t have access to insulin. Life for a Child is a …
In a recent article (“Have I cooked my insulin?“) I wrote about safe handling of insulin, including how long I leave it in my pump. While I was away in Uganda it seems there were some nasty heatwaves here at home. Now I’m back, and noticing that tomorrow (Friday) is going to be a stinker. The insulin …
We’re getting well into Summer here in Australia, and the question of how to keep our insulin safe in the heat keeps coming up. All the manufacturers will tell us are the storage requirements listed in the official drug approvals. Legally they would find it hard to recommend anything outside that without first going through …
Here in Australia we have three fast-acting insulins available, although it seems many people are only aware of two. Humalog (insulin lispro) from Lilly, NovoRapid (insulin aspart) from Novo (called NovoLog in some parts of the world), and Apidra (insulin glulisine) from Sanofi. These are used for meal-time boluses and corrections by people using injections (MDI), …