Diabetes mistakes you made

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Tdm

Tdm

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Thought it may be nice to have a thread to share diabetes mistakes you have made, to help others avoid them.
There is, of course, the caveate that diabetes varies between types, people, and how one manages it.
I'll kick off...when you see some insulin on your skin following injection, its probably best not to do what i did once and assume you haven't given the full dose and inject more. Unless you enjoy cramming sweets into your mouth in the middle of the night.
 
My biggest mistake was a few years ago.
I wanted to check my levels before going into a meeting with an important customer.
I pricked my finger (did not have a CGM at the time) but no blood came out,
So, I shook my hand vigorously.
The good news was that my blood started flowing.
The bad news was that it went all over my crisp white shirt.
A little bit of blood can spread a lot,

So, I went into the meeting looking as if I had just slaughtered a rabbit!

Morale of the tale: put your thumb over a pricked finger before shaking your hand vigorously!
 
I always inject my basal and bolus for breakfast as soon as I wake up and before I get out of bed and I keep both my insulin pens in the same case but in set positions... basal on the outside in blue, Fiasp in the centre. I dial my dose up by counting the clicks and inject into my buttocks so don't really look at the pen and never put the light on to inject even when it is dark because I don't need to. That morning, I clearly wasn't thinking straight and I took the wrong pen out of the case dialed up my very large Levemir dose (twice.... 11 units into each buttock) and then just as I was putting the pen back into the case a tiny bit of very dull dawn daylight caught the pen and I realised that the pen was red and I had just injected 22 units of Fiasp instead of 4. Of course I then had to start raking around the house for stuff to eat to mop up all that insulin as well as inject another 22 units this time of real Levemir from the blue pen. I put tape around the Levemir pen after that so that it feels different so that I hopefully don't make the same mistake again. The panic of course at such a massive dose made me feel sick and it was a challenge to eat enough sweet stuff to keep me afloat, but whilst I did drop very slightly into the red at one point, I came back up quickly and because I kept score of everything I ate and a running tally of the carbs, I was well chuffed that I didn't overtreat..... So I snatched a victory from the jaws of defeat that day!

Another time when I was on NovoRapid which took forever to kick in on a morning and prebolus time was about 75 mins, I decided to stick a Nature Valley protein bar in my bum bag and have a breakfast on the go. Injected 4 units of NR before I left the house, went to the farm with my partner, caught and harnessed 2 horses, nipped to the loo before we set off in the carriage and took my bum bag off to use the loo...... and of course, with being busy with the horses I forgot to put it back on. Got about 6 miles from the farm when I realised that I didn't have my bum bag with all my testing kit, protein bar and most importantly my hypo treatments..... that bum bag always went everywhere with me, so I didn't keep hypo treatments anywhere else. It was very rural, so I panicking that I might have to run and knock on some strangers door at 7am in the morning and beg some sweets off them but we rummaged through my partners farm coat pockets (used for everyday farm work so totally manky) and found 2 loose dirty fluff covered mint imperials that were there for the horses and I slowly sucked on them till I got back to the farm. I am guessing the adrenaline from the panic pushed my levels up and enabled me to get back safely. I would have been mortified if I had had to knock someone out of bed and ask for help and Ian would have struggled to help me with 2 horses to look after.

The good thing is that you learn valuable lessons from these situations and I think I have probably gained a lot of confidence from surviving and managing them quite well even if I did create the problem in the first place.

I think @helli has to recount her holiday story here of injecting breakfast bolus and then locking herself out of the cottage....That has to be the best story ever!
 
When my daughter was about 12 we were visiting my parents for a few days. Sat down to eat tea before we came back, at the time daughter was on Roche Combo pump and Libre 1. (For those not in the know, the Combo consists of pump + blood meter, the meter links with the pump via bluetooth and acts as a remote control for the pump, so you can keep the pump itself hidden under clothes and only have to touch it to refill it or remove it for showering.) On this occasion I did daughter’s finger prick (she was quite capable of doing it herself but tended to just give me the meter and let me do it, happy to say that these days she does everything herself) and got a reading of 27.5. Normally a number that high would instantly ring alarm bells but I must have not been thinking clearly and just entered the carbs and told the pump to deliver the bolus. THEN scanned the Libre, and got a nice steady 6.8… wiped her hands and did another finger prick and got something like 8.0, oh **** I’ve just given her a massive correction dose that she didn’t need! So once she’d eaten her savoury food I just put a plate of cakes in front of her and told her to dig in, which she didn’t mind at all. After that though we had the problem of a 3 hour drive back home. Thank heavens for the Libre, that made it a bit easier, I just asked her to check regularly on the journey and amazingly she was OK, I think eventually once we got home she went a bit high but nothing ridiculous And was easy to correct. Had plenty of glucose in the car just in case but didn’t need that. Phew!
 
Another one I thought of… only a minor diabetes element but might still cause a smile.

When my brother was on his honeymoon, he arranged for my parents to spend a day waiting at his house for all the wedding presents to be delivered. They were happy to do that, unfortunately when the delivery arrived they both went outside to start bringing the parcels in, only for the door to slam behind them… it was a Yale lock of course and the house key and mum‘s handbag and all their own keys etc were locked inside. At the time I think mum was still on mixed insulin, it was near lunchtime and she was getting hungry, so could have been a massive disaster. Luckily dad found a £20 note in his back pocket and there was a shop just round the corner so that problem was averted. But they then had to sit outside with all the wedding presents waiting for a locksmith to come. My brother had also arranged for a friend to pick him and his wife up from the airport on their return, so dad then had to go round to the friend’s house to take him the new key and explain what happened, the friend thought it was hilarious and actually waited until my brother tried to open the door with the old key before he gave him the new one and explained :rofl:
 
rebrascora said:
I think @helli has to recount her holiday story here of injecting breakfast bolus and then locking herself out of the cottage....That has to be the best story ever!
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I had stopped thinking of that as a diabetes story. I think of it as the time I locked myself out of the holiday cottage, walked up and down country lanes in my PJs looking for the owner of the cottage because I had no mobile coversge to call her (and failed) and then rock climbed the stonework of the cottage to squeeze through the very small upstairs window.
Until you reminded me, I had forgotten about the burnt croissants in the oven and the insulin on board.
i guess that’s because I tell the story to non-diabetics who don’t understand pre-bolusing.

Lesson of that day: make sure the door is on the latch if you don’t have the keys in your hand.
And take up rock climbing … you never know when it will come in handy
 
Back in the very early days after being put on insulin ( was originally diagnosed Type 2 after having part of pancreas out) I had finished work, checked BGs, fine, no Libre just finger prick. I always walked to and from work, three miles each way, and this night was particular cold, wet and windy. I battled with the elements all the way home, up hill, about 10 minutes from home I felt really peculiar, I’d never had a hypo before and so didn’t know the symptoms, I was dizzy and sweaty and thought I was going to die. Got home did a finger prick, low 3s. I had absolutely nothing in fast acting to treat a hypo, complacent I suppose and kept been told I wasn’t a real Type 1 and can’t go on a DAFNE course does that to you, I started panicking when in my befuddled brain I remembered there was a lone can of full fat Coke I used to get in for my son in law. I grabbed it from the back of the cupboard and then had to force myself to drink it, lukewarm at that. Yuk! It saved the day but it was the foulest thing ever. Since then I’ve never been complacent, I always have JBs or Kendal Mint Cake in every pocket and bag. I also quickly learnt about the effect exercise can have on your BGs. I then started nagging my DSN to allow me to attend a DAFNE course and I was finally rediagnosed as Type 3c.
All’s well that ends well.
 
I suspect that trusting my GP to alert me to my actual test levels rather than accepting 'everything looks fine' for over 10 years before diagnosis with full blown type 2.
I was given a lot of paperwork after achieving remission, which I just put in a folder - only recently did I look at it with the knowledge of numbers and noticed that little + sign in the column for a test done back in February 2005, print out date August 2018.
 
Going down to London for a long-planned meal with son and daughter in law - 6 course tasting menu, totally vegan, contents unknown, so I would be winging it as far as bolusing was concerned. Arrived at restaurant, studied menu, made rough carb calculation, reached for insulin pen. It was bad enough that we’d had to stand on the the train all the way to Euston, but things got worse when I realised that having made the decision to accessorize for the occasion by swapping my usual gargantuan handbag for a more modest model, I’d forgotten to transfer my pouch of pens/needles. So no bolus for me throughout the meal and the journey home. At least Libre kept me informed that I’d more or less got away with it!
 
Assuming my need to go to the toilet was due to cranberry teas. Doh.

Mind you, when i finally made an appointment with the gp saying i suspected diabetes they said they doubted it and booked me in for a test in a couple of weeks time so i was not only one who made mistakes
My a1c came in at 111.

Also made the mistake of not taking control of my insulin intake for a month and a half after diagnosis, waiting for DSN to tell me what to do. I lost faith in their advice and gained control of my sugars about the same time. Self management is key, in my opinion
 
RichardsUsername said:
I awarded myself the cake. Clearly, big mistake.
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Trying to weigh porridge on kitchen scales the stuff went everywhere in my hair, up my nose, on the floor. I really didn't have a clue how much porridge I ate. One day I found out I could buy the stuff in pre weighed sachets. Deep joy.
 
Sharron1 said:
Trying to weigh porridge on kitchen scales the stuff went everywhere in my hair, up my nose, on the floor. I really didn't have a clue how much porridge I ate. One day I found out I could buy the stuff in pre weighed sachets. Deep joy.
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I do like a good breakfast story.
 
Mine was thinking, you took insulin everytime you ate, not realising you needed a 4 hour window to allow insulin to get out of your system.
Suffice to say after suffering some bad hypos, my cf diabetic nurse said - ummm, don't do that. Well then tell novices like me
 
Thinking it would go away if I ignored it. Just because they found it by doing my blood tests doesn't mean i felt i had it . So I just ignored it. My cousin lost weight when hers went high. Silly really i just got fatter and more unhealthy. So yes my biggest mistake.
 
Sugarcoated said:
Mine was thinking, you took insulin everytime you ate, not realising you needed a 4 hour window to allow insulin to get out of your system.
Suffice to say after suffering some bad hypos, my cf diabetic nurse said - ummm, don't do that. Well then tell novices like me
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This really annoys me.
Partially because you were not told about the profile of your insulin (stays active for about 4 hours) but also because you were told an incorrect rule to wait 4 hour between insulin doses.
It is more complex than this and I hate it when HCP over-simplify the message because they think we are too stupid to understand.

Yes, fast acting insulin stays acting for about 4 hours. So, you need to understand what to do about that "insulin on board" if you need to inject again within that time. For example, if I injected for lunch and three hours later had tea and cake, I would go very high if I had correctly calculated my insulin dose for lunch and had not taken any insulin for the cake.

Sorry, I will get down from my high horse.
 
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Sugarcoated said:
Mine was thinking, you took insulin everytime you ate
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You should take insulin every time you eat carbs. You don’t have to wait 4 hrs between eating. If eating within 4 hrs sends you low then you’ve got your insulin wrong.
 
Deciding that I was doing so much walking during a week in Pembrokeshire, and later a week in Cornwall, that I could get away with more than the 130g carbs that I'd been sticking to since diagnosis. My next HbA1c included both those weeks and the result was 41, up from 38 the previous time, so I rapidly put myself back on my less-than-130g per day diet and, since our new leisure centre and swimming pool had recently opened, I added twice-weekly swimming to my exercise regime. Next HbA1c due in September, and hopefully it's gone back the other way.
 
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When I was first diagnosed two years ago I was told just take two units of insulin for lunch and dinner. I was absolutely clueless and just did as I was told. Three days later had a prawn salad for lunch took a hypo and didn’t know why. I called the diabetic clinic and was told about counting carbohydrates. I felt I was to blame. And I was also told the insulin injection lasts about three hours in your system. I took that to mean until very recently you couldn’t eat anything within that period.
 
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