Day 3: Diabetes Bloopers

Oh let’s see if I can think of anything that has gone awry or triggered a giggle or two in the last 8 ½ years…

A few weeks before I was actually diagnosed with Type 1, I was on a two-week trip to France. I was losing weight like crazy and singlehandedly dropping the country’s water table with the amount I was drinking. Which means I was constantly on the lookout for la toilette. On one lovely walk through a park I was panic-stricken with the need to find a ladies room. We spotted one and I ran in, grateful to find that there was no line up. I pushed open the door to find…squat toilets. What?!?! I yanked down my pants, got halfway into position and couldn’t hold it anymore. Yes folks, I peed all over my pants and shoes. ALL OVER.

My not so brilliant cat found one of my lancets lying on the counter and proceeded to eat it.  Hard plastic parts, pointy needle part.  The whole damn thing.  We rushed him to the cat clinic once we found him lying in a semi conscious state.  He was fine...once he recovered from an acute case of pancreatitis (no joke).  Oh the ironies. 

I was camping way up in Northern Ontario and getting ready to change my insulin pump insertion site. I laid out my supplies, dug my insulin out from the cooler and prepared to do as sanitary a job as I could in the wild. Suddenly, out of nowhere, the clouds gathered, the wind picked up and the sky opened as a horrible storm came whipping through. I stood under the whirling tarp trying desperately to insert the needle as my partner ran around securing camping supplies and keeping everything from blowing away.

On my first flight to Cuba as a PWD I was paranoid about setting off alarms at the airport with my boxes of needles and vials of insulin. I came armed with letters from my doctors and had studied exactly how to explain the situation in Spanish just in case. Somehow, my needles, test strips, insulin and other paraphernalia made it through unnoticed but my forgotten Tim Hortons cookie was confiscated on sight. Sad day.

I learned quickly not to test myself too many times on the same finger. On one particular day, I pricked my finger but the blood wasn’t coming out so I squeezed…hard. Three recently used testing sites opened up and a spray of blood shot out – right into my eye and all over my face. Lovely.

This past winter I was out on a long run in the middle of a winter storm. My wonderful support team was carrying my supplies in the car but had put them in the trunk so my glucometer froze. We were too cold to warm it up in our hands so I tucked it into the warmest place I could find. Oh yes my friends – the glucometer crotch warming trick. Very effective in February snow storms!

Hope that elicited a few grins of solidarity out there…