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If you take insulin using multiple daily injections, do you use any visual cues to easily tell the difference between your long-acting and short-acting insulin vials/pens? (For example, wrapping a hair tie or rubber band around one type of insulin, or adding colorful tape)
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When I did do MDI I didn’t do anything special. The long acting bottle was different than short acting as well as the rubber stopper was a different color.
I keep my long lasting separate from my fast acting. I keep them separate so I can go to my long lasting a lot easier than my fast acting. Fast acting is stored in a zippered up place in my purse with a bunch of stuff on top of it. My long lasting is in a pouch right up front in my purse. Easier to grab.
Keep in a different place. Bathroom for long acting and kitchen for short.
I have been on an Insulin Pump for Forty years. Enough said.
long acting pen is in the kitchen closet. take it once a day in the morning so once I take it, I ignore it until the next day. never put fast acting in the closet
Long acting stays in the fridge. Short acting goes with me. Except when traveling, then I’m VERY careful. Would be be nice if they weren’t all blue.
My humalog is in an InPen which is blue metal. Kind of hard to mix up with beige Toujeo long acting pen.
My InPen is pink, that has the Novolog and my Tresiba is dark blue. On purpose!!
Long-acting is kept in a case (leftover from Levomir, perhaps?) in a drawer. Since it is only used once a day, it is c convenient to put it away out of sight. Short acting is in my cosmetic bag that carries my libre scanner, glucose tabs, extra needles, etc.
Where I keep them in the butter tray of the fridge, long-acting on the right and short-acting on the left. Also, purple lid vs red lid which I keep on with a baggie and rubberband or twist tie. These are vials.
Yes. One is a pen and the other is a vial.
I use an InPen for short-acting insulin and vials for long-acting insulin so they are easily kept straight.
The “glargine” (lantus) insulin pen is light blue, aspart (novalog) navy. Take the glargine first thing in the morning in bed generally (joy of retirement) although both are in a mug on my nightstand overnight.
Long acting Treisiba is in the drawer in the kitchen and I only take it once a day. Fiasp is always on me or in my bag so no need for visual cues.
√ N/A – I do not use multiple daily injections
But when I DID, I didn’t do this and like everybody else I got it backward once. Oops.
The pens are different. But extra layer of safety is I only take long acting in the bathroom and I never take short acting in the bathroom. Mixing these up has always been a huge fear.
I wrap part of the barrel and the needle guard of my syringe for Lantus w/ masking tape. The syringe for Humalog (lispro) has a scale marked in half units. The Lantus syringe scale is whole units. I keep the vials in their boxes which have different dimensions and come clearly labeled.
I keep my Humalog in the kitchen because of better lighting. I keep my Lantus on nightstand. Take 2 injections a day. Place syringe beside Lantus bottle. At night after injection remove syringe. Simple solution to remember if I have taken Lantus. I also make and take diluted Humalog. I use different colors of fingernail polish to adorn the bottle. This works well.
Definitely. I keep my Novolog pen in the little kit I carry everywhere. I store my Lantus in the fridge. Keeping these two things in different places is critical. I would (and have) accidentally grab the wrong pen if they were both in my kit all day long. Oy vey!
I have been on an insulin pump for 22 years now. I now only use it for my basal insulin though. I am using the Afrezza inhaled insulin now for boluses now and I absolutely love it!!!!!
Yes, different colour pens, Novopen Echo. Red for basal, dark blue for regular and light blue for rapid action.
Although I now use a pump – back when I did MDI a colorful rubber band around long acting insulin was a great visual tool
I wrap a rubber band around my lantus vial, so I have both a visual and tactile cue.
Both my pens are very different in color which is hard for me to mix them up but just incase I kept them in a specific spot so I know which is which.
I store my current vials of short and long term insulin in different places. When I used Lantus it was simple to distinguish between short and long term due to the shape of the Lantus vial. Now, however, the Insulin Glargine I receive from the Veterans Administration comes in the “standard” vial so more care is required.
Different pen colors usually do the trick, although recently Novonordisc has also made the Levemir pen thinner than its Fiasp partner and more sluggish to inject with, perhaps to avoid such mixups. The different injection feel is sufficiently striking to make a mixup mistake almost impossible to imagine When the pens were identical except for color, I mixed them up once due to being inattentive when I injected (I normally inject Fiasp first, but the danger comes when I only need Levemir), I took my standard dose of Levemir as Fiasp instead (27 units), fortunately when I was already rather high, realizing my mistake just as soon as I finished injecting. Although the mistake ended ok, it was an experience I’ll never forget. I immediately wolfed down two large chocolate bars, four cans of fruit nectar, 72 Jelly Bellies, and was rushed off to the emergency room by my wife where a pre-emptive IV port was installed, but never had to be used — my sugar binge worked, along with the relatively short lifetime of Fiasp. That traumatic single experience ingrained in me the importance of paying attention whenever I inject. Injecting the two insulins generally twice a day does get to be such a routine that it’s easy to zone out, but just as breaking my ribs in a shower-stall bathmat fiasco (no grab bars) made it impossible for me to ever step into a shower mindlessly, the trauma of my Levemir/Fiasp mixup seems to have done something similarly protective to my brain. In any event, given the notable difference in injection feel now between Fiasp and Levemir, I can’t imagine mixing them up ever again.
It did just occur to me that it would have been better for Novonordisk to have made Fiasp the slower and harder insulin to inject, rather than Levemir, because that’s the direction of mixup that matters. I suspect I would accidentally inject Fiasp in place of Levemir before the difference in ease of injection even occurred to me, since Fiasp injects so quickly. In any event, it may not matter because I don’t think I’ll ever be inattentive again when I inject.
No, the two pen colours work fine for me.
No. the two pen colours work for me.