The Hannen Family

Louie posted the other day about receiving Shealyn’s pump. We spent the weekend pouring over the 222 page manual that comes with it. Yes, 222 full-sized 8.5×11 pages…. and that IS all the English parts. None of that foreign language filler in there…

I had an appt with her CDE at Duke yesterday and I was expecting to have Shealyn put on a Saline Trial. Most offices require you to do a week or so as a practice run on the pump before going ‘live’ with insulin. After seeing that I had already programmed most of the pump and customized the settings, her CDE (Jean) commented on how we were so prepared. After hearing the few questions and concepts Louie and I had discussed, Jean threw the saline aside and let us go live. YAHOOOOOOOOO!! She said I was one of the most prepared, educated, and confident parents she has dealt with in a long time. Apparently, some families arrive and haven’t even opened their box yet! I just can’t imagine that!! Your child’s LIFE depends on the proper use and understanding of this pump. How can you NOT do your homework?! It’s just a concept Louie and I don’t get… Lol….

After I placed her infusion set and hooked her up, I panicked and remembered she still had Lantus (24 hr baseline insulin) in her system from the previous night. Jean calmly said that was the next step and showed me how to program the pump to delay infusing any basal units until 8 p.m. when the current Lantus would be gone. I called Louie a few minutes later to share the good news about how Shealyn had handled the infusion placement well AND we were on insulin already. What was his immediate response? “What about the Lantus from last night??” I laughed and shared with Jean, who just shook her head chuckling and muttered again about how she wasn’t going to worry about us at all.

We had a little slumber party last night and Shealyn slept on a mattress on the floor of our room. I had to flip her over a few times to get her off the pump and checked her glucose about every 2 hours or so. We wanted her close in case there was a blockage or some other reason for an alert. I’m not sure we would hear it over the monitor or not, so Louie and I were both more comfortable with having her near. Her overnight numbers were the best they have been since she was diagnosed almost two months ago. We have already seen great improvement in the control and are looking forward to fine tuning it even more over the next month or so. She seems to have adapted well and we’re off to a great start! I’ll post a photo of her proudly wearing her pump soon.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 4th, 2007 at 2:06 pm and is filed under Diabetes, Shealyn.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.