Diabetes Christmas!

 Today is Diabetes Christmas, Today is Diabetes Christmas, Yes it is Diabetes Christmas for me!  That special day all of us pumping diabetics love, when we get a new pump.  I have shown you pictures of my quality Animas IR 1200 which has taken a licking and kept on ticking but her time has come and should have been about two years ago but I was a dummy and tried to do the Omnipod thing and have been left to resort to my old pump ever since.  The first thing my dietitian and I went over was the cool new One Touch Pingy thingy that is a glucose meter that communicates to your pump.  Now I can test my BG's and send over my bolus from my pingy thingy.  This was one of the few features that the Omnipod had that when I resorted to the IR1200 I missed but now I get it back.  The thing is about the pingy thingy is that the meter almost feels like of some quality build and material.  That is different from any other meter I have ever used.

 The next Diabetes Christmas item I got was my Dexcom seven thingy.  Now this thing is like cool, and yes I know that I am about the last diabetic on the planet that now has a CGM but now my BG's are a game and keeping the dots between the lines is fun.  Now for the freakin 1980's case is something less than desirable even for a dork like myself so if you know of another way to fashion this thing to my belt please shoot me an email: davehennesey@hotmail.com

 Then the pup itself, is the pump called the pingy thingy or is the meter the pingy thingy?  Either way I call it my pump and the meter is the pingy thingy.  This thing is kind of a small let down in certain ways but kind of good in others.  The thing is there is nothing different from the interface, look, and feel of the pump from my old IR1200 which is good for a non-techno idiot that I am.  The bad is when you get something new you want bells and whistles to say "hey I have a new pump" not something that looks 100% like your old pump.  The first thing I did with my old pump was to take the battery cap, cartridge cap thing and the belt clip in my spare parts bag.  Since I have been an Animas guy for a while I know how much those things cost and how often they break.  The things that are not warrantied by Animas are always the things that go.

Today I spent 1 hour and 50 minutes with my mail order pharmacy for almost no reason.  I must tell you that mail order pharmacies are 90% hate for me and 10% frustration because you talk to call center morons that tell you they can't do this or do that because it is corporate policy but they never thing about how if you don't get it you are dead.  The first thing was they did not receive my insulin prescription from my doctor and my old script expired two days ago.  Now lets talk about the three, almost four years I have been getting my insulin from them and they can't send me any out because it expired two freakin days ago?  I am not ordering 1-800 flowers, I am getting live saving meds and I use you every 90 days.  The next thing was since I switched to the pingy thingy I needed to get strips ordered but my script is for freestyle and the pingy thingy takes one touch.  Do you think they can just fill the script with the different strips?  Oh hell no they can't because they are not the same and they don't do the same thing so I needed a new script for the pingy strips.  I let the person know how stupid that sounded that I would have two scripts on file (for the same thing) that I can get both filled every 90 days because the company sees them as different, hey I just found out a way to scam my insurance company for 900 test strips every month.  Now I know to get a script for five different meters so now I can get 900 test strips (oh yeah I test 10 times a day) times five scripts every 90 days.  Bring on the apocalypse because I am going to be stocked with test strips for a long time (or until the insurance realizes how freakin stupid they are and change the policy to just allow one script for test strips).  When you go to your local pharmacy you get to know the people behind the counter pretty well (because you are diabetic and you are there every week) and with that relationship you both can reasonably deduct and find solutions to problems the short, fast, and easy way.  Call center mail order pharmacies will be the death of all diabetics in this country, mark my words on it.  Company policy over three years of ordering insulin and oh yeah my insurance covers it.  That is truly dum with a "b" at the end of it.