Watch me!

   I'll spare you another round of "how much we love the pump".  Believe it or not, we did find one shortcoming that we are not crazy about right from the beginning.  It's nothing huge, but it was concern enough that I decided to add to Jonathan's gear.

   When we bolus Jonathan and have the BG reminder on, we can set the pump to alert when a certain period of time has elapsed.  While this is a neat feature, it has two issues that we don't like: 1) Inside his neoprene case the "discrete" alarm is not loud enough to be heard reliably, especially in a busy setting, like a classroom or a playground.  2) The alarm automatically unlocks the keypad, and you can't change that.

   For the past few weeks, we've been relying on the teachers and Latchkey staff to remember when to test him, and they've done.....

    *** This just in... mystery solved.  We've been randomly missing data in Jonathan's downloads... they're been randomly using his the meter I put in his lunch bag as a back-up... his old Accu-Check... the one that doesn't talk to the pump." ***

                                .......  a great job (aside from using the WRONG METER).  And that little tidbit did come to light in the middle of my statement of praise.  On the bright side, they are testing, regularly, and recording.  And poo-poo on Medtronic for not allowing manual inputs of BG on the CareLink site - not thought through too well if I do say so myself.

   OK, back to our dilemma of inaudible audibles and auto-unlocks....  I thought to myself, Jonathan has taken such good care of his Medic-Alert bracelet over the past year, I think he could be responsible for a small wrist watch.  So one day while I was on "vacation" a couple weeks back for pump start I started looking around.  I stopped at the closest Wal-Mart and started looking at watches.  They had all kinds of cool little kids watches, most digital, some with an alarm (1 alarm).  I asked the lady at the jewelry counter if they had kids watches with more than one alarm.  She looked at me like I was asking for a $20 genuine Rolex.

   As with many good things, I decided to hop right to the internet.  I was amazed and the variety of "medical watches" available.  There were even ones geared specifically towards kids.  There were some amazingly beautiful ones that you might have expected to find in the collections of James Bond, Bruce Wayne, or Tony Stark.  And, as you may have guessed, the majority of them were grossly overpriced, at least for my taste...err.... budget - my tastes exceed my budget, but I'm cheap so it all works out.  It took a couple of hours, but I found a great deal on one of the watches I though could be the ticket.  I saw it as high as $75-80.  But I found it for $32.07US + $4 shipping to Canada.

   From what I can gather it was originally intended for children with "potty issues", but with 8 alarms per 24hr period...  guess what....  it's the new string-tied-on-a-finger.  This weekend we'll be "training" Jonathan to respond to the alarms with a BG test.  The alarms I've already programmed in are about 2 hours after his school-day breakfasts and lunches.

   Funny, I started this blog post with a peeve in my head about people doing "something" wrong and the BG not getting to the meter, and ended up with a new working theory.... A neato watch that Jonathan will hear and no meters that don't link to the pump should help ensure we get all our data!

   Anyway, the watch is a great concept (I think).  We just got it and he starts wearing it tomorrow so I can't attest to it's greatness yet, but I think the concept was definitely my cool idea of the month.

Oh!  And speaking of cool......