Clean It Out

This is by far the most difficult topic of Diabetes Blog Week for me this year.

Yesterday we kept stuff in, so today let's clear stuff out. What is in your diabetic closet that needs to be cleaned out? This can be an actual physical belonging, or it can be something you're mentally or emotionally hanging on to. Why are you keeping it and why do you need to get rid of it?

To get some inspiration, I read through the entries already posted for this topic. Surprisingly many of those are about all the supplies us people with type 1 diabetes need to store and use. Actual physical things in an actual physical closet.

My supplies take up space too. I put some effort into keeping them organized, and rarely have problems with the sheer volume of the supplies. What gets to me, however, is the way they are packaged. One thing in particular, are the user instructions. I get my tests strips in a package of 10 containers; one container of 50 strips lasts for around a week. Why does each one of them come with its own user instructions? And my infusion sets too, for each pack of 10 I get 2 different booklets.

All these instructions I just throw away immediately. It's just so much waste, over years and years of use. Couldn't they rather make some beginners set that's available when you first get your pack of certain type of supplies? And then all the subsequent packages would contain just the essentials.

Yes, I am aware of some of the regulation that's in place for patient safety. But in this particular case, with consumables I use day in, day out, for many years, I don't really see the benefit of having to immediately discard so many user instructions.

We often demand a lot more. Better devices, more accurate test strips, sensors for CGMs, etc. When someone asks me what I could do without and where would it be possible to save some cost, I say the user instructions for the everyday consumables.