BIPOLAR PUMP SITES

my bad pump site

Okay, so I informed you all about what an insulin pump is and briefly described the downfalls of having a pump. BUT just yesterday I (again) experienced one of the most random and bipolar parts of having an insulin pump. So, I am going about my day, cleaning my room, waiting for my boyfriend to come over and my site feels funny. For those of you who are unsure of what a "site" is, it is the place where the pump is connected to my body. Anyways, so I lift up my shirt to look at it and what do I see? Brownish-red crusty stuff around the bottom of the sticky part of my site. I was like hmmmm weird I wonder what that is. As I began to push lightly on the site, it was sore. My next step was to check my sugar...455. WOW! Not good. I came to the conclusion that I needed to change the site, so I went about the process of putting a new one in and when I went to take the other one off, I was surprised by a discolored sticky thing (the part that holds the site to my skin). It had not only the brown crusty stuff around the sticker and as a circle around where the site was in my skin, but also a yellowish-brown color as if insulin/blood had been leaking. It hurt! There was a hard core like substance inside where the pump was in my body, too! I don't remember bumping it or anything, but somehow it got messed up.

where you can put pump sites

There was a happy ending because my sugar came back down to 121 (which then turned into two other low blood sugars that night; 66 and 71) and the new site is working fine. The moral of this story is that diabetes can never be perfectly controlled. Something always happens to mess it up, but you can get it under control and get back on track. It is a constant battle and really a big guessing game. Anyone who has ever experienced a bad pump site, whether it be on your own body or by watching me have to change it because my sugar has skyrocketed knows what I'm talking about.