KITLIVING
continued over
Sue Wales uses a
640g insulin pump
from Medtronic
(right) and Abbott's
Freestyle Libre
(above). Of the
combination
she says: "The
FreeStyle Libre is so
easy and the trends
are useful. Plus,
no-one notices me
using it when I'm
at work. The pump
is great because
you can adjust your
basal and do small
extra boluses if you
need to."
eat to match the insulin dose. There
were no blood test meters back then; I
had tablets that I dropped into my urine
in a test tube that changed colour; blue
meant you had a safe reading of glucose
in your urine, orange meant your sugars
were high. That was all we had back
then. We know now that this was a very
inaccurate reading, as your urine would
have accumulated over a couple of hours
so it would be a mix of several hours of
eating, and so on."
Wales continued at university playing
lots of sport and doing the kinds of
things that students do, which was not a
disciplined life, but carried on training to
become a qualified nurse, then ended up
working as a sister on a diabetes ward in a
hospital in the early '90s. "That was hard,"
she remembers, "I was seeing the effect
diabetes was having on people, but I just
got on with it. I was lucky that the staff
would keep an eye out for me and would
tell me if I went a bit 'wibbly', which was
my word for having a low blood sugar. In
the main I had not had many bad hypos
as my fingers and lips would tingle when
a low was coming on so I mostly knew
when it was happening."
Clinical inertia
Attending the annual diabetes check up,
Wales says, "It always felt like an annual
'telling off' when I went to the clinic. Of
course I thought I knew all I needed to
because of my job at the hospital. By
the early '90s I was on an insulin pen of
www.freestylelibre.co.uk
www.medtronic-diabetes.co.uk