Dotter 2.0

I have a bionic daughter! Dotter version 2.0!

Here is her tummy, and the line, and her brand new green Cozmo insulin pump. This little beauty is worth more than anything else we own (yes, even more than our cars). Thank goodness for the wonderful parents who did the fund raising so she can have this.

The connection into her tummy is just a soft cannula tube, it goes in for about 9 mm. The clear plastic 'button' and sticking plaster sitting on top of the insertion is to hold the tube securely in place, and cover it to keep it clean, and it also allows her to disconnect the pump when she's having a shower. There isn't a permanent port, nothing surgically implanted. The site gets changed every 3 days (something she's just learnt to do herself), it's basically like doing an injection, only what gets injected is a needle and the soft plastic cannula, and the needle comes back out, leaving the soft tube in her tummy.

Of course, as it's stuck in her tummy for 3 days at a time, hygiene is much more important, we have sterile swabs, and have been taught how to wash and dry our hands like a surgeon does.

Now all she needs to do is lots of finger prick blood tests, she'll always need to do those (until under-the-skin BGL monitoring works better, anyway), and then she enters her blood glucose reading, and how much carbohydrate she's about to eat (to the nearest 5g), and the pump does the rest, delivering the insulin she needs - so no more injections for every time she has to eat!

We have a few nights of 3 hourly blood tests (midnight, 3am, 6am) ahead of us, and two more days of hospital visits, but we're going well so far, if a bit overwhelmed with information ... it's good though. Very good.