Travel to Melbourne,Australia.

[maurden]

Hi.
I am a type 1 diabetic on 4 injections a day I am trvelling to Australia in a few weeks and never having travelled for this amount of time I am a bit concerned about my injection times.
At the moment i inject, Quick acting insulin at Approx= 8am-12noon-5pm,and slow acting at around 10 pm, being that Melbourne is 11 hours in front of G.M.T. can anybody help me how to work out the the times to inject.

 

[DeusXM]

The time difference actually makes things easier.

Your quick acting should be injected at mealtimes so you don't need to worry about the time difference - you just inject when you eat as normal.

With your basal, you've got two options.

If you take your basal at 10pm UK time, and Melbourne is 11 hours ahead, then you could simply take your basal at 9am Melbourne time (ie. 10pm UK time). As you're on one jab a day, I'm assuming you don't have wildly different basal requirements between day and night, so this could work well.

The other option is to move your basal either backwards or forwards in advance. The trick is leaving 22 or 26 hours between each basal dose. In your case, you probably want to move backwards.

So, what you do is in the UK, do your jab at 10pm UK time (9am Aus).
Then the next day, 8pm UK (7am Aus).
Then 6pm UK (4am Aus).
Repeat this cycle until you are then doing your basal at 11am UK (10 pm Aus).
You'll then obviously need to shift it again on your return.

As I said, the trick is to keep 22-26 hours between each basal injection. As long as you do this, you should be ok.

 

[AlisonM]

How long are you staying in Oz? If it's just a short while I'd stick to doing your fast acting jabs at mealtimes and your bolus on UK time if you can.

 

[Phil65]

The time difference actually makes things easier.

Your quick acting should be injected at mealtimes so you don't need to worry about the time difference - you just inject when you eat as normal.

With your basal, you've got two options.

If you take your basal at 10pm UK time, and Melbourne is 11 hours ahead, then you could simply take your basal at 9am Melbourne time (ie. 10pm UK time). As you're on one jab a day, I'm assuming you don't have wildly different basal requirements between day and night, so this could work well.The other option is to move your basal either backwards or forwards in advance. The trick is leaving 22 or 26 hours between each basal dose. In your case, you probably want to move backwards.

So, what you do is in the UK, do your jab at 10pm UK time (9am Aus).
Then the next day, 8pm UK (7am Aus).
Then 6pm UK (4am Aus).
Repeat this cycle until you are then doing your basal at 11am UK (10 pm Aus).
You'll then obviously need to shift it again on your return.

As I said, the trick is to keep 22-26 hours between each basal injection. As long as you do this, you should be ok.

This is the option I chose when I went to Melbourne on a cricket tour in 2005. My worst memory was having my rucksack stolen, took my eye off it for a second and it was gone! contained all my diabetes stuff! 😱 So 12 hours later after recovering from high bgs and a trip to Melbourne Hospital (they gave me all the kit I required and were brilliant!) I had recovered. It also made the local news and a guy in a liverpool football shirt was caught on cctv pinching it....I wonder if he took an injection? 🙄

 

[everydayupsanddowns]

The only time I've ever gone long-haul (a fab 5 days in Singapore) I just shifted basal in one big lump rather than doing it gradually.

While this did necessitate a little 'firefighting' in terms of overlap and/or shortfall in the 2 journeys, my logic was that things were going to be out of routine anyway and I was likely to need to be correcting highs/lows anyway.

I figured since it was not unknown for me to have forgotten/delayed a basal dose in my D history with only a little subsequent wobble, then moving the dose by 12 hours at a time was no major issue. If memory serves I think I did a half dose on the plane to sort of 'bridge the gap' to the next evening in the new timezone.

I suspect if I'd tried to do it 'properly' (gradually shifting to meet the new timezone in smaller steps) I would have probably have ended up missing forgetting some of the transition doses anyway!