Next January I’ll be 20 years into my career in data analysis. I actually have “data” in my job title. So of course when I was diagnosed with Type 1
Diabetes I figured I had an advantage. I
don’t know if that’s actually true in practice, but it certainly means I spend
a lot of time thinking about numbers.
What I hadn’t really thought about was getting a little more perspective
on those numbers. I know how many units
of insulin I take for different foods and how many needles and test strips are in
the prescriptions I fill every 3 months…but I never thought about what that all
looks like. With that in mind, I decided
to spend the month of March finding out.
I saved every needle and every test strip for 31 days to see what I do
so I could share it here for perspective.
I’m the one poking all these holes in myself every day, but seeing the
volume of them was shocking. And the
exercise left me with something of a biohazard on my hands!
Every day in March I put all of my needles into a plastic
cup in my kitchen. If the month extended
to 32 days I wouldn’t have been able to maintain the delicate balance at the
top of this pile. For context on size,
the object behind the cup is a Kitchen Aid mixer with the awesome cover my mom
made for me. It only took a few days for
me to be awed by the volume accumulating at the bottom of the cup.
At the end of the month I counted the needles
and set them up in rows to get the full effect.
How many? That’s 248 needles, an
average of 8 per day. Most days are less and a different month would be somewhat lower.
March had some weekends away from home that included beer, which means I
was dosing more often than usual. Things
don’t take long to add up.
I also kept all my test strips throughout the month. There’s no cute way to display these, and I
kept them in a Ziploc bag until it was time to count. Even with my CGM keeping tabs on my blood
sugar, I test a lot. That’s 292 strips almost filling half a cup, an average of over 9 per day. I’m actually curious as to whether that
number would go down if the beer I mentioned hadn’t happened. I was testing an average of at least 9 times
a day before I got my Dexcom, and I’m not conscious of testing that frequently
now. I’ll probably test it again for a
week some time to see how the numbers come out.
Between injecting insulin and checking my blood sugar I
poked 540 holes in myself during March.
That’s somewhat surreal to realize, and I’m the one actually poking each
of those holes. I poke those holes every
day with no time off for good behavior.
I don’t do it to cure my disease; I do it to stay alive and
healthy. I downplay what goes into T1
pretty regularly, but make no mistake – this is a lot of work. It’s also a whole lot of puncture wounds.
For some additional context I thought I’d show what I mean
when I talk about insulin doses. One example was when I described accidentally
injecting 27 units of Novolog (fast acting insulin) instead of Toujeo (basal
insulin). With all the images of the
needles and test strips that I go through in a month I thought it might be
meaningful to show a unit of insulin. The
pictures below shows a single unit of insulin in the same measuring cup the
test strips are in above. That’s it, one
unit down there in the center. Making a
miscalculation in a dose of just one or two of those units can be the
difference between normal blood sugar and a shaky, scary low, or even a trip to the hospital. That’s my margin of error, a drop you can
barely see in a photo. I zoomed in so
you’d be able to see it at all.
What’s my point with all of this? My goal was and is showing the scale of what
goes into managing T1. I’m not
complaining; I didn’t know what to expect when I started saving all these
scraps. But in hindsight I can also say
that the next time I say “it’s fine,” or “it’s no big deal,” I might also remember
I have to stab myself over 500 times a month to stay alive. So yeah, I’ve got this. But 500 holes a month is 6,000 holes a
year. That’s kind of a big deal.
