No matter what you are doing, the first time is scary, awkward, and uncoordinated.

During training, I sort of did it, but Maureen was coaching me all the way. Even so, the process is complicated and involves many steps. By no means was I confident about doing it myself. When it became time to refill insulin and change out the infusion set, I was so nervous! I had printed instructions with steps and pictures. Unfortunately, steps were missing. The transition steps, from one step to the next, were not shown. I guess my trainer guided me through the transitions. I should have taken notes.

I wanted to call Maureen, but I would not let myself. I studied the documentation, user manual, handouts, and even went to the website and watched videos. All that effort was not as helpful as I hoped. I was just going to have to suck it up. I had to get good at this task because I had to perform it every 72 hours. Yep, every three days. I had to take this assortment of medical parts and get them to work with the black box (a.k.a. device).

Before I can even begin, I have to unhook the tubing from my body. Then, remove the insulin cartridge from the device. Now, rewind the cartridge compartment. I found the command on the device’s menu and tapped it. Immediately, I heard the whir of something rewinding. Hey! It’s doing it! I celebrate this small victory before I move on to harder steps.

I discovered that this device is VERY impatient. I will be following along its instructions, but by the time I am ready to proceed, it is steps ahead of me. It will not wait for me to catch up OR let me start over. I called the Bionic help desk, hoping they could tell me how to back up and start fresh. They did me one better. With questions, they determined where I was and what I needed to do next to make things right. Unfortunately, inserting the tubing connector into the vial of insulin and locking it in place just wouldn’t work. I remembered how to do this step, and yet I could not convince the connector to play well with others.

I was sure I was screwing up, so I didn’t think to try a new connector. I did, and it popped in on the first try. What a relief! Now comes the hard part. I need to attach the device to me. The documentation tells me to “insert the infusion set”. Like it’s that simple. Ha!

Remember the circular container I opened to get the tubing out? Well, now it looks like this. And yes, the vertical thing in the center is the needle that will be inserted into me to place the cannula at the end of the tubing that carries the insulin.

Now I have to prime the inserter. Which means I have to pull the white section out of the bottom of the blue circle, making sure my fingers are on the grooved sides of the circle, while I pull the white center back through the bottom.

Now it looks like this:

While putting the blue circle against your skin, one has to hold the sides where the smooth buttons are. They are fairly invisible, so you have to feel them.
Prepare yourself to be injected. This happens when you push in the two buttons simultaneously.

Now you must gently remove the injector from your implanted infusion set. The tubing (I refer to it as my leash) is 23″ long. For being almost 2 feet, it is a short leash. For example, I have to unhook the tubing before using the restroom. There is a danger of pulling the device off the counter and breaking it. Or worse, it goes for a swim in the toilet.

Now that my bionics are up and running, I need to clean up the trash from the packaging and get the needles into a Sharps container. (Count your blessings if you don’t know what that is)

Stay tuned and find out if the third time really is the charm…

TTFN