Stop telling me that it's just a joke and I'm overreacting. You didn't mean my illness. You meant the fat guy's illness. That's like telling a family fighting cancer that "It was a joke about cervical cancer, not childhood cancer."
I’d like to tell you that I’ve solved shopping-related low blood sugar (shopoglycemia?), but I haven’t. Each week marches on and the milk and coffee must be replenished.
Abbott’s Freestyle Precision Neo is as slender a meter as you will find on the market, with a battery that will last for thousands and thousands of blood glucose checks. While the meter itself is inexpensive ($22-27 depending on retailer), one of several features of the Neo that is revolutionary is that the strips are priced low enough that Abbott tells customers they can “skip the co-pay.” A box of 50 strips is less than $25, as low as $19 from some retailers.
My five-year-old daughter thinks diabetes is something she will have when she’s a mom. Like me, she’ll write stories, have brown hair, have two kids, and have diabetes. Diabetes often needs my attention just like her little brother does. And sometimes diabetes takes priority over both of them. And I resent that.
I will never forget the story I heard from Life for a Child several years ago about the children who stood at the end of a village road waiting for insulin to arrive from aid workers, crying when a vial fell to the ground and shattered. I weep when I think of those little ones watching that hope and hopelessness pool into the cracks of the dry earth.
Too many of our eye exams don’t include dilation and blood pressure checks and advanced technology like OCT and FAF. When I asked my own retinal specialist to he chooses not to check blood pressure at my appointments, he explained that he considered blood pressure checks to be the jurisdiction of a patient’s general practitioner, but in the next breath told me that he is the only caregiver that a number of his patients with diabetes see for their diabetes.
I was given the opportunity to do a free two-week trial of the Vibe on behalf of A Sweet Life. Having never used an Animas pump before (but nearly all of their competitors), I was particularly excited to see what they’re all about and to get my hands on the first Dexcom G4-integrated pump system.
J&J Animas finally received US FDA approval of their Animas Vibe Dexcom-integrated insulin pump that has been available in Europe since 2011 and will start shipping in January 2015. Another player in the CGMS business, Abbott Diabetes, received the CE Mark for their new FreeStyle Libre Flash Glucose Monitoring system in 2014.
The Diabetes UnConference focuses on the psychosocial aspects of living with diabetes and will allow all of the participants an opportunity to share and learn from each other.
The “unconference” concept came from the tech community, who found that an open participation forum was a wonderful way to learn from others and get answers to questions that wouldn’t have been brought up during a keynote speech or an “expert” talk.
With the announcement of Animas Vibe’s FDA approval in the United States and last week’s first shipments of Asante’s new MySnap reaching customers, it’s the perfect time for an insulin pump comparison. Which pump should you be using in 2015?