Finding the chase and cutting to it

Being a type 1 diabetic puts me in a reasonably unique position as far as NHS prescriptions matter. If my insulin was re-branded tomorrow, my prescription with the old name would still be valid as it is describing a medicine.  In fact, under UK and European law, we now order medicines via their generic names […]

If there is one truth in my life it is that I love to learn. Yesterday, I got to share some of my learning about Insulin Kinetics with a group of gifted and talented students at Ipswich School. And thanks to Wikipedia I could reuse with modification the insulin structure image to help share what […]

It is Sunday, 14th December 2014.  13,516 days ago (that’s 37 calendar years to you and me) I received insulin to treat diabetic ketoacidosis as I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes mellitus. The expectation at the time was not great: being a girl and before the introduction of home testing for blood glucose, it […]

NB this is not teaching you what pumping is and expects you to be familiar with some of the terms.  It is a breakdown of the operational and design features of some of the insulin pumps on the market with an in depth view on the Accu-chek DTron, Early Medtronic Paradigm and Animas Vibe pumps. […]

So the DTron is no more 🙁 I’ve been coping OKish on multiple daily injections of insulin and have (touch wood) finally got a combination which almost works… Time Actions 0640-0700 Test then potentially bolus now for breakfast at 0800 (or later depending on how high or low I am). 0800-0830 Long acting dose, insulatard, […]

The outlook is not good. In 1993, on the back of a piece of paper I drew what I thought a pump should look like: a motor, a casing and a pen cartridge, some tubing and the cannula.  In 2002, I got my first pump and it looked like that, albeit with a 3ml cartridge […]

I have just finished listening to an interview of Tanni Grey-Thompson by Aled Jones: what a terrific person.  Someone I would definitely want to talk to if I ever met in a pub or on a train. One of the most interesting things Tanni talked about was when she got her first wheel-chair.  This isn’t […]

I’ve been a type 1 diabetic for a long time – I was diagnosed in the Silver Jubilee year, so do the math! Figures matter: my life is spent watching blood sugar results and ensuring they fall between the magic 4-8mmol/l (72-144mg/dl) to give me a great chance of not developing serious complications from diabetes.  […]

If all is going well, there’s nothing unusual going on, diabetes can be  straightforward. The continuous subcutaneous insulin infusion device (an insulin pump to you and me) makes this easier by stripping out the least configurable and predictable part of insulin replacement therapy – the long acting insulin. Instead, your body receives a closer match […]

I wrote the original pump tools back in 2002 as a JavaScript calculator.  As I moved into web service development, I ported the crude calculations library to a Java bean interface to a set of libraries.  I put a jsp front end to collect data from the user. This is great and one of the […]