First Bad Site 2/6/09

About a week after starting the pump, Andrew woke up with BG 498. Since it was so high, Gene bolused right away & included his breakfast carbs in the bolus. When he told me about it, I asked if Andrew had checked for ketones (it's a urine test). We'd never really seen ketones before, so Gene had forgotten our new rule that we must check for ketones before giving a bolus. Andrew checked and they were large (scale is negative, trace, small, moderate, large)!!! They had only been moderate when he was diagnosed. We called the doctor on call to find out what to do. The site was likely to be the cause, but there was no way to tell how much of the 10.6 units he had actually received. We had to wait another 2 hours to check & if it was still high, give a shot. The doctor said not to bother sending him to school until this was resolved. There was no time to get a sub, and I had a student teacher, so I took Andrew to school with me. At 8 a.m., I took his BG and the meter read, "High, over 600." His BG was too high to read! The doctor's recommendations made sense at 6 a.m., but now that it was time to give a shot, I didn't know whether to give the 4u maximum correction or replace the entire 10.6u dose he should have had at breakfast. I picked up the phone and called our friend, Andrew's school nurse. I told her I felt like I needed to give a shot now & asked her which dose she recommended. She said that you can always give more, but you can't take it out. I gave 4u. Then I went to change the site. I was very nervous & worried. I tried to follow the steps for preparing a site, but somehow messed it up. I had only brought one site to school, so then we had to leave school to come home. We had just changed the site when the phone rang. The school nurse was checking on Andrew & asked where his BG was. Still High, over 600. She recommended giving the rest of the breakfast dose via injection. At 10 a.m., his BG was down to 460, but his ketones were still large. It was scary to see him get so sick so quickly. By 11:00, he was down to 287, & at lunch 84. The crisis was over, but it took awhile for my nerves to calm down. There was no point in heading to school at this point, so he just stayed with me at school. At the end of the day, he went to the gym to shoot hoops with a friend's child. He put the pump in his pocket, but it fell out during play. You guessed it! The site ripped out! All I could do is laugh. I learned that day that a pumper should always carry multiple sites!!!