Just when you thought you had covered everything....

With a life of T1D you count everything, you monitor your BSL, you monitor and counteract the impact your excercise has, you make sure that anything you do or don't do doesn't have a negative impact. Now along with everyday tasks this would seem like enough but it isn't.

Tonight after a well controlled day for both myself and my daughter I proceeded to test her prior to her final bottle before bed. I went through the usual process of making sure her figure was clean and entered the BSL strip into the meter to activate it to the point it would ask for the blood to be added to the strip. Unfortunately this is where things became problamatic. The meter would no longer identify the test strip and hence would not turn on.

I could activate the meter manually however this just proves the battery wasn't dead and it only allows you to check the memory which in this case was useless to me.

Now as usual you always have a backup meter or 2 which I do have however the one thing that I hadn't counted on was the test strips in both of my backup meters being expired. In this case we were using the Accu Check mobile meters as the backup and not really considering that the strips would have an expiry date I thought everything would be fine however I was wrong again.

Keeping in mind all of this happened at 6.30 pm on a Saturday night (no chemists open). I had a back up back, back up plan which if everything else fails then we would both share my meter however I needed to check one last thing. Upon driving to the chemist to triple check I noticed that it was closed however there seemed to be a staff meeting going on. Sitting out the front of the chemist I decided to call them to see if anyone would actually answer. Luck was on my side as they did answer and the allowed me to come in to get some supplies. With the advancement of the technology in the mobile meter with having the cartridge strips rather than the individual strips was something I hadn't experienced before. Time to stick with the individual strips as a back up.

I suppose the moral of today's story is to make sure everything is checked on a regular basis and have back ups for your back up plans. Today I was lucky however another day I may not be.