Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Hoarding Part 2

 OK, so yesterday was part one of hoarding and the theme was "insulin pumps from days gone by" and today we get to the bottom of the madness.  The biggest problem for me is changing out my finger pricker thingie.  I hate to do it, and yes I know that using dirty finger prickers can cause loss of fingers, toes, arms, eyes, and maybe internal organs but I hate changing my pricker.  We all get scripts for prickers and I of course love my doctor because she writes my script for testing 10 times a day, but the consequence is whenever I refill my pricker order I get 900 prickers and I hate to admit this but that would last me about a lifetime or two.  So you get what we have here which is 700 prickers that expired probably five years ago.
 Then there are the betes bags you get with your meter.  I used to use the bag that came with the meter but now the first I do when I get a new meter is chunk the bag.  These bags are crappy, odd sized, and cheap.  Why is it to Carry something to help us live better lives they wrap it in the worst possible container?  Now I am a smarter betic from my years of learned-ing so I use my set bags and look for third party vendors whenever I need to update one.
 What do they call these disks, something like a 3.5 floppy?  I have been holding onto this disk for like 15 years now and for the life of me can't remember what it had on it.  Now it is gone and I feel better about not having it.
 These silhouette infusion sets were the greatest thing when they started updating infusion sets a good 15 years ago.  Remember the little dangle part on the old infusion sets where the disconnect was about 4 inches from your site.  The looks I used to get at the pool, and not for my looks because who has a 4 inch tube sticking out of their stomach?  Oh yeah the diabetic does, silhouettes were and probably still one of my favorite updates that came to the diabetes world of pumps.
 More freakin lancets, and BD lancets at that.  You know how many times I have ever used a BD lancet in the past 10 years?  Lets put the number at less than 10 and I had alot more of these boxes that hit the trash.
 This to me is the part of diabetes that we all know and hate, the used test strip laying around.  I think they have some sort of electrical polarity that makes them stick to floors, drawers, boxes, and anything besides a trash can.  The good old comfort curve is probably another great diabetes invention that I loved.  That little curve on the strip and being able to add more blood while it was reading changed my life about testing my BG's.  I almost wanted to keep this nasty thing to remind me of how freakin big test strips used to be and how awesome the comfort curve was.  I need to do a list of diabetes advancements that I personally feel have made my life better, and another list of diabetes updates that are or were just dumb.
 More prickers and yes this was another 5 unopened boxes of 100 pricks.  The softclix was a pretty good pricker, I liked how it was more defined where it would stick you so you could like slowly do a circle around your favorite spot on your finger and make it last longer before you got the over-used pains.  See, another advancement in diabetes care that changed my life an accurate pricker that allowed you to abuse smaller parts of your fingers for longer.
Here is a small snapshot of what I kept and yes the boxes behind the onetouch ultra strips are 7 boxes of Accu-check mulitclix prickers.  Now this is the best pricker invention of all because it is like 7 prickers in one pricker so now I actually rotate the drum every month or so to get a new pricker and maybe now my spleen will not explode because I use dirty prickers.  There are 800 Accu-check complete strips back there as well.  The complete was the Swiss army knife for diabetes and still is to this day.  It had your meter, test strips, and pricker all in one unit that you could read in daylight or at night.  The only issues with the meter were drums getting stuck, cold or hot weather made the thing not work, the sheer size of it and a few other misc. items but I keep these strips around and a good five or six complete meters as a backup.  Oh yeah they also use regular batteries so you don't have to buy those overpriced hearing aid batteries.  This adventure into cleaning out my diabetes hoard was alot of fun and really an eye opening experience into myself and what features I have enjoyed or changed my life in the short 25 years since I became a sugar diabetic.  Who knows what the next clean out will look like.

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