Lost in a sea of cunts
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I have been seeing a specialist diabetes team and when they want me to get a blood test I get them to send me a PDF of the form and I trot along to the hospital where I am normally in and out in 15 minutes.
Saves the nightmare of trying to get through to the GP on the phone and getting an appointment with the phlebotomist. I am also not the easiest person to get blood out of and the full timers in the hospital are much better at it.
You are a stone and I claim my ÂŁ5.
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I think that my issue is the different regions - I could go to Guyâs for the blood test and it would be quick to sort, but I donât want to travel so far.
I too have rubbish veins. Last time I went to the GP for the blood test she stabbed me four times and still failed. My record for cannula fails was six, and theyâre no fun at all.
That is no fun 
I would have made a rubbish junkie.
I have trouble getting a drop out for a diabetes prick test*, I have the lance set at 5 and still struggle.
*waits for the âthere is no need to testâ joke 
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Did they do a session for Steve Lamacq back in the day?
This. I had so many canula fails that on one occasion my CT was done without contrast. Now I go straight to day oncology and ask for one of two nurses who are geniuses at floating in the needle without issues.
One of the nurses at the infusion clinic named her favourite vein in my left wrist Gerald, she loved it that much.
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I suggested calling mine Spike, but the Nurse didnât think that was funnyâŚ
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Itâs very much a skill. I have good veins (I can tell proper phlebotomists because they say âOoh, nice veins !â) and thereâs usually no problem with getting stuff into and out of them. The only grief comes on trials when the nurses stand back and âlet the doctor do itâ. The doctor is usually a researcher and TBH probably worse at putting a cannula in than if I did it myself. One of them once confidently said âWeâre going to put the cannulae into the backs of your hands because theyâll be in for a few hours and itâll be more comfortable for you than if we do whatâs easier for us and put them into your elbows.â Fifteen minutes later both of my hands looked like well-used pincushions at which point she put them into my elbows. She even needed two goes at getting one of those in.
VB
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Doctors are typically poor at it. My worst experiences are with radiology staff. Multiple staff failing at their three goes leaving my arm black and blue on one ocassion.
The nurses are well practiced at what they do, but often not trained for non standard places for cannulas. The doctors are trained for it, but not actually that practiced.
Itâs great going to the infusion clinic, because they are both fully trained for cannulas going anywhere, and well practiced at it.
The downside, of course, is that they then use the fuckers to shove poison directly into your bloodstream.
This is true. However, that which does not kill me makes me stronger or makes me whinge like a bitch.
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This is good news. Postcode lotteries when it comes to conditions like type 1 diabetes, which are barely affected at all by community or environment, are patently stupid.
However the media coverage that Iâve seen hasnât addressed a more subtle but significant aspect of this issue. It seems that someone has decided that âapproximately 25% of type 1 diabetics would benefit from this deviceâ. IMHO (and I am a type 1 diabetic whoâs tried these sensors at his own expense) many more of us than that would benefit to an extent. That extent would include allowing us to live more flexible lives. The management of type 1 diabetes boils down to trading off lifestyle flexibility against long term health outcomes. The NHS is only interested in the latter, and I suspect theyâll refuse to issue the sensors except to people who fall into categories where thereâs a demonstrable improvement in blood glucose control. They have past form in this regard e.g. when the finger-prick test strips were first introduced and even, back in the 1980s and 90s, when there were calls for disposable syringes and then insulin pens. One of the more annoying things is that these judgements are quite often made on a category basis, not on an individual patient-by-patient one. Iâm now over 60 and Iâve had relatively few complications arising from my diabetes. I fear that those two things will mean that the NHS wonât be prescribing me Libre sensors any time soon 
.
VB
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This, so much this.
Our eldest has Type 1 and for 7 years his control was good enough that he didnât meet the NICE guideline to get a pump. One quarterly hba1c above the threshold and his consultant could justify moving him directly to a pump, and that has been an absolute life changed for the better.
The guidelines reward those with poor control, rather than thise whi work very hard at maintaining control, very frustrating.
As for the CGM, his experience with the Freestyle is that it was better than finger pricks, but bobbins in comparison to the Dexcom G5 and itâs accompanying smart phone amp
Now if we could just get the CGM to talk to the Omnipod via Bluetooth he would be awayâŚ
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Interesting observations re the Freestyle vs the Dexcom. Iâve never tried the Dexcom. Iâm pretty primitive when it comes to interface needs, so as long as the Freestyle was presenting me with the truth on its little hand-held monitor then I was content.
My experience with the Freestyle revolved more around whether the sensor itself was actually working reliably. As well as ones that I bought myself I also had a few plugged into me for free as part of a drug trial. That was done by a very competent nurse and even then they didnât always work first time (and with those sensors thereâs no second time of course, you just throw fifty quidâs worth of kit away and try again). When they did work they tended to be pretty good, especially if you were prepared to cross-check the calibration once in a while with a finger-pricker. But when they acted up (e.g. one morning when my arm was out in a cold wind) the readings were all over the place - dangerously worse than useless. That was a couple of years ago and things move fast in this field. Iâm hopeful that the passage of time and much more field experience will allow Abbott really to improve the reliability of the wet-chemistry end of this product. As I say, when they work well they can be just great.
VB
We self funded the Lifestyle for 6 months and found when in normal range it generally gave reliable results, however when outside normal range, I.e. below 4.0 or above about 10.0 it became really inaccurate. It also required the users to actively interface with it to scan the current reading and recent past. A real show stopper for 15 year old lad
We have found the Dexcom G5 to be reliable for a wider range if readings, about 3.3 up to 17 before it gets really off piste, and the fact it actively talks to smartphone app which can alert to impending lows or highs, and thus trigger intervention actions, makes it much more suitable for 15 year old male due to (1) smart phone is surgically attached to hand and (2) it tells him to react because reasons. As parents it also allows remote monitoring and alerts which can be very useful for night time hypos after evening football training, for example.
Having now the Dexcom and the Omnipod together have both genuinely changed his glucose control and his day to day life, itâs quite something tbh
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