Went to meet a couple friends for dinner and drinks and my lancet device (aka stabber) decided it was dead. This meant that I had to take the lancet out of the device and jam it directly into my hand, which is one of my very least favorite things to do on earth. What makes the device preferable is that it has a spring inside, so it's a very quick jab, and you can also set the depth of the jab. Neither of those benefits is available in the self-jabbing method. I tend to stab myself very slowly (Little did you know that my minor was not art, but actually masochism.) so as not to hurt myself more than necessary, so I have to push the lancet into my finger a little further each time to get enough blood, all the while saying OW OW OW.
I decided to keep the broken lancet device on the table (much to the delight of my dinner companions, I'm sure) to remind myself to drive over to Walmart afterwards to buy a new one. Brilliant! Except, at the end of dinner, I just got up, put it in my pocket, and drove home. I must have used up all my brilliance on Sunday, when I thought to check the gym shoes Chris had just bought for Ant to make sure they were both the same size. Ding ding ding! One was 10 1/2, the other was 11. It would have been awful to get all the way out to Topaz the night before he had to have the shoes to figure that out.
I really didn't want to drive to Walmart tonight, so I checked my box of extra diabetes crap to see if I happened to have an extra lancet device. Why yes, I do! But that one's busted, too. Let me just put that back in the box and see what else we've got. Ooh, this one looks fancy.
I had a small, sealed bag with two of those little drums, so I ripped it open and tried to figure it out. Pulled the cap off, stuck a drum inside, turned this, turned that, pulled, played Bop-It... nothing. Pulled the drum out, tried flipping it over, pull, twist, spin... nothing. Pulled out the laptop and googled it.
Learned that I had the drum in the right way the first time, but pulling it back out made the red stripe visible, which means that the whole frigging drum is now deemed useless and will not go back in. I just wasted six lancets. Nice. Next, follow the instructions, insert new drum, use low depth setting as suggested, prime the device by pushing the plunger all the way down, make Hulk noises as I learn that "all the way down" is deceiving advice because the release button has already turned yellow, press the release button as I hold the device against the heel of my hand, and... dink. The depth setting is too shallow and I have to squeeze and squeeze and SQUEEZE the heel of my hand until I milk enough blood out to fill a test strip. As I'm squeezing, I realize that if I want to try again to get more blood, like I could with my (broken) lancet device, I would be forced to use a new lancet each time. Seeing as how the lancet drum has to advance after each lancet deployment, I think I had better save my remaining lancets until I can get back to Walmart to buy another $6 plain lancet device.
"Isn't that easy?" says the clearly non-diabetic Australian lady.
No comments:
Post a Comment