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Insulin Pump Bubbles
Tips to get rid of those frustrating bubbles!
Oh those annoying insulin pump bubbles. Everyone with a pump, or parent of a young pumper, has experienced frustration at some point in time with these - including this diabetes educator with diabetes! Scroll through these tips to see which ones help you. And a big "thank you!" to all you pumpers who contributed to this list. If you have a new one to add, click the "contact me" button on the left. Thanks!- Use room temperature insulin . Cold insulin creates more bubbles.
- Draw insulin into the cartridge slooowly.
- Draw beyond your desired units and slowly push the plunger back up, forcing bubbles back into the vial.
- Tap the OPPOSITE side of the cartridge across from the bubble. Yes. Weird, but every nurse and educator will tell you this works WAY better than actually abusing your fingernail and tapping the cartridge where you see the bubble. I've found this trick works best for me.
- Tap using a ballpoint pen to avoid hurting your nail (although, if you use the tip directly above, you can probably dislodge that bubble within 1 to 2 flicks).
- Ah yes, do remember to fill your insulin vial first with air. Flip the vial over before you start drawing down the plunger - the plunger might actually move down slowly by itself just from the pressure of the air in the vial.
- If you've got a million or trillion ...ok...just "a lot" of annoying teensy insulin pump bubbles, you can intentionally turn the vial upright, suck in a small dollop of air, flip over and try to amalgamate all the little air bubbles into the one big one (eg. roll the cartridge gently so the little bubbles come in contact with the big one) - then push the one big one back into the vial.
- Fill the cartridge the night before and let it sit upright at room temperature - most of bubbles move to the top. The next morning, reattach the needle, place into upside down vial and inject insulin pump air bubble back into vial. Gently and SLOWLY pull back plunger to fill those few units with insulin.
Leaving Insulin Pump Bubbles to go Home: How to Lower Glucose Levels
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