Pricks and Sticky situations

Yes, I'm talking about finger pricks and keeping sensors stuck on your skin, especially now that the weather is starting to warm up for the summer.

I'm doing a research study for a sensor, as I've stated before, and I currently have two quarter-sized stickers on each of my arms.  The first week was all fine and dandy, save for the re-creation of habits to make sure I checked my blood sugars 8 times daily. I didn't have any issues with the sensors and I went about my normal life (mostly) with the stickers in the back of my mind. Unless people asked about them, I would forget that I had the sensors on.

Week two has proven to be far more difficult. The sensors started to itch, much like normal pump sites do after a couple of days, and the stickers became a little less secure on my arm.  It wasn't until I took a shower this morning, though, and went to go work outside that I realized half of the devices on my arms were on the verge of falling off.

Now it wouldn't have been the end of the world. The sensors coming off is part of the study, of course, to see how effective the device is. However I'm convinced that once one comes off the rest of them will follow and I'll have no sensors left to calibrate before the end of the study. So I did what any rational person with diabetes would do: I went into my medical cabinet and tried to find a bandaid big enough to hold the sensor in place.  I found a bandaid, but my arms are apparently not the tackiest of places to have anything so it fell off within moments. I found athletic tape, but received a similar lackluster result. This was bad news, of course, because I was going outside to do yard work and if I were to sweat on top of a precarious two sensors on my arm they were sure to fall off and get lost in the dirt we were moving around.

Phase two required a bit more creativity.  I couldn't use bandaid glue because I didn't want to damage the device, obviously, and it was difficult to reach around the back of my arm to really effectively apply the glue anyway.  I wasn't desperate enough to use actual glue.  I did, however, have a big stack of flexible tacky cover that I had once used on my pump sites when I was younger.  Back then I would cut a hole out of the material so that the tubing could fit around the underside of the site, but I just put the whole thing atop each sensor for reinforcement, and it worked! I finished my yardwork with all of the sensors intact.


  It had been a while since I'd had to worry about a site falling off or about needing reinforcement for a diabetic device, but I'm proud to say I succeeded in keeping the sensors where they were supposed to be. We'll see what the next few days bring before I take the sensors off on purpose!

Have you dealt with a similar situation in your diabetes care? If so, how did you handle it?

Best,
Heather