No, no double injection, I’m very careful of that and I don’t reuse pen needles anymore (since I got a ton of them recently) so I know if I threw the pen needle out I injected, I also get reminders from my fiance, if he’s not at home via text, to take my basaglar… after a week or so where I got distracted playing video games and took it a bit late but not to the point it ever caused a problem and I text him back afterwards so if I ever doubted it I could look back.
Not open to the pump again in my future , but this is making me wanna try to get some sort of cgm, to get the full picture and see what happens to me more because I just can’t test every hour or something.
I’m not advocating a pump for you, I’m just saying that this sort of experience was enough to help my doctor get thru insurance hurdles for both devices for me, that’s all.
I’ve got my fingers crossed for smoother sailing for you! CGM was a huge game changer for me. I did shots without CGM for five years, and shots with CGM for three years.
One other thing that can go wrong is if you accidentally take rapid-acting when you intended to be taking your dose of long-acting. I did that once. Took my normal lantus at the normal time, an hour later I was crashing badly and it took an enormous number of glucose to get back up, and then I had to keep taking more glucose because it would turn right back down again. It all stabilized after about 3 or 4 hours, so that’s when I figured out I must have somehow blundered and taken novolog instead of lantus. After that I always did a ritual when taking the lantus. I would say out loud “lantus is long,” then I’d look at the vial in my hand to see that it was a long vial, not a short novolog vial, and then I’d draw up the dose into the syringe and inject it.
Just bumped into our Dexcom rep at Costco pharmacy yesterday. At least in California you can get the Dexcom for cheap if you don’t have insurance coverage for it. Here’s a blog post about it:
Also an endo will know how to write the RX to explain why you need more strips. And a low A1C (while great!) can be used to indicate for insurance approval reasons that you have hypoglycemic episodes that put you at risk.
A lot of people asked this when I explained it to them like my mom was like did you take your mealtime instead of the night time? No…admelog and basaglar are so different in the pen one being a solostar, one being a kwik pen, color wise they’re only slightly similar but the shape is enough to throw me off on that. They feel so different . I did make the long acting instead of fast with lantus and admelog when I was finishing off my lantus stash, but this would not be the explaination as I know for sure I used lantus and after I got back down to normal numbers the next day I was pretty ok despite not eating much due to not knowing what would happen…so the basaglar was there.
Not in California, I live in southern IL (near St. Louis) and if the nearest costco has this program then maybe I’d consider it, but it’s still quite a bit (South County is a bit of a trek , could maybe do it on my weekends off if this is my only option and it’s available there too, but it’s kind of still a pita) .
The thing is I never really have had that bad of hypos (minus the hospital incident which is by all means not my fault) even when I was testing more (my rx was for 8 strips a day I think of ultra blues and I did 6 most the time as a happy medium between 4-8 like my endo recommended) until my 6 months of unemployment and so far 6 months on medicaid. I did lessen up on testing for a while because …I’m normally very symptomatic with very very mild hypos (like 69 mg/dL has me a shakey sweaty mess , sometimes I get symptoms with anything in the 70’s but I do kinda account meters aren’t perfect and do try to carefully /conservatively treat it with a snack) so I usually pick up on them, but I’ve not tested legit low at all for long it made me relax my testing to save money. I picked up on one earlier this year (this incident on Sunday night being on my 2nd noted hypo of the year) that may of been serious but due to the crappy nursing home I worked at I didn’t have access to my test kit (they had a strict rule that made it really difficult for me to test, this prolly violated ada rules but I didn’t wanna fight this place as an unemployed person with no resources) until after eating a few sugar packets and then when I finally got off my shift (was waiting for my relief to arrive, she finally made it) I took a few glucose tablets at my purse and tested in the 90 mg/dL range after that, may of been 60 mg/dL, may of been 50, I was dumb not to test but I didn’t feel I could. I have had some in the 70’s numbers on this meter (mostly just right before this disaster) but I fear that will not be counted as it was not true hypoglycemia and was pre-prandial with no insulin previously taken or recently taken. So far since quitting the vitamins I’ve been in my usual 80-130 range with no problems so that’s gonna prolly make it harder to get anywhere. So I’m slowly thinking yeah it was the vitamins some how , or the bad basaglar site. Hard to say still entirely but I’ve been good since that disaster night calmed down. Not to say it’ll be like that forever though so it’s a bit scary and I still wanna try to get a libre out of pocket if nothing else to figure out if there’s anything weird going on I can’t figure out from frequent testing (which I did yesterday for every 2 hours bye bye money) and did 2-4 (somewhere in between due to distraction) hours post meals each time today with unusual yet, other than a lower postprandial at lunch than pre-prandial (89 postprandial, 103 pre) which…may be something funky but after eating dinner it wasn’t bad at all. and I’m at 113 mg/dL on my last test planning for a snack just in case.
I strongly feel I won’t be able to get more strips or a dexcom on medicaid simply because they see those as a convenience (not medically needed) for people who have sub 7% a1cs and are aware of their hypos and don’t have huge post meal spikes (I rarely spike above 150 at the absolute worst most the time, most the time I’m within -/+10 mg/dL of the preprandial ) …but I called my doc for a referral to an endo in the area, I hope they do accept a standing referral to figure this out. Hoping for an out of pocket libre miracle if nothing else happens.
edit: found out due to research, medicaid patients are NOT eligible for costco’s cheap dexcom prices at all . So another option down and impossible.
. So another option down and impossible.