Mine is bigger than yours is

Mine is bigger than yours is

Men spend a lot of time comparing sizes. Who has the bigger salary. Who caught the bigger fish. Whose wife has the bigger breasts. And who has the longer… well, you know. So guys, my infusion set tubing is longer than yours is.

But the funny thing is, I actually thought the opposite was true until I whipped out my handy Stanley 12’ measuring tape this morning.

Here’s the deal: I could have sworn that my previous pump could lie on the floor when I’m standing up naked. OK, that’s probably too much information, but I actually have a point to make here. The Snap pump doesn’t quite make it to the floor from my infusion site. It dangles just a hair above, and pulls on the site.

If you’ve never worn a pump, the sensation of having your site tugged on is an odd one. It doesn’t generally hurt (unless a doorknob grabs the tube while you are moving past it at high speed), but it’s an uncomfortable sensation. Some of it might be more mental than physical. Like when a scuba diver sees bubbles gushing from a shark-severed air hose: Yeah, he’s still breathing for the moment, but he knows it’s not for long. In the same way, our infusion set is our lifeline. Don’t tug on a man’s lifeline.

Now in case you didn’t know it, pretty much all the infusion sets in the world are actually made by the same company, Unomedical, who re-packages them as the various brands we all know. Snap’s are made at Unomedical’s plant in Mexico. Well, that’s not quite right. The Snappers in the Sunnyvale, California, plant make the prism/hub connectors and then send them down to Mexico where Unomedical attaches them to standard infusion tubing and sets, packages them up, and sends them back up to the states. Gotta love the global aspects of diabetes.

The Snap sets come in angled or in 90-degree cannulas, both short and long. The tubing comes in either 43 inch or 23 inch. The 90-degree sets come with the popular disposable “hockey puck” inserter. The angled sets are the manually inserted kind, which is a pity, as I had been using the Inset 30s which have an extremely clever disposable inserter. It’s not that I’m a wimp about inserting an infusions set by hand, but this is easier, faster, more precise, and since I’ve been using them, I’ve had fewer kinked cannulas.

Now… where was I? Oh yes. Because my pump wouldn’t hit the floor, I began wondering if someone was trying to shave a few shekels off the production cost by cheating me of an inch or two.

Thus the Stanley tape measure today.

And guess what? My Snap tubing is a full 44 inches long. I got a bonus inch.

The Inset tubing for my Tandem? 42 inches. They cheated me of an inch, damn them.

But wait a sec, you say, with a full two spare inches and a longer pump to boot, why on earth are you having pump-flat-on-the-floor-while-naked issues? I have no idea. Maybe I’m placing the sets a bit higher on my stomach. Maybe I’m standing up straighter. Maybe I’m naked with the pump on the floor so rarely that I was mistaken in the first place.

But one thing’s for sure. I’m two inches longer than the guy with the Tandem pump.

Next time: Dropping Kittens.