Traveling as a Diabetic

Today I want to talk about traveling with diabetes and the ins and outs of safely getting to where you are going with all of your stuff.

Let's face it - if your a type 1 diabetic like me, you've got a lot of clinical baggage to have to bring along. No matter what type of diabetes medication your on or if you're on any medications for anything, do not check your bags. Anything can happen to your checked back and if your baggage gets list, then your medicine is in their also. If you have to bring on a huge carryon bag, then bring on a huge carry on bag.

A couple of things that I've found online is a little fanny pack and it's smaller than my regular fanny pack. We went on a two week river cruise / land trip to France and so I kept most of my supplies on the boat, but if we did a short excursion, the fanny pac is great because you can have your insulin in their if you need it and nothing like that in it.

For the big stuff though, I've got a bigger carry on and I just strapped it on myself getting on the plane and its from may and I can anything and everything in here. Now the deal is, is that insulin can get warm and you don't want that to happen so you can have little insulator for your insulin and they come in different sizes. This is from frio and its a cooling product. It comes with this little guy and you can soak it in water in the little pellets in there that activate and keep the insulate cold. You can put it in the sink in the water over and over so you never have to worry about your insulin going bad.

One mistake that I did make though on this trip, is that I had my pump on, I had extra - always take at least a third extra of your supplies that you think your going to need in case something happens. I had some more insulin in case my pump went bad, I had my long acting insulin pen and got all of those supplies in a big bag.

What I didn't do was that I didn't realize my pump was going to need to be changed out and we are coming back and I thought "all my supplies can go in there because I'll get home and if the luggage gets lost I have my supplies at home".

Well I was going to run out before then and we were in Frankfurt and so what I did was I cranked down the percentage on my Basel unit on my pump and I made up the rest with the long term insulin in a pen. The problem with traveling is that you have to think of every eventuality and that's the hard part and so with every trip you take your going to learn something else. So just to give you a little heads up, all these supplies and products can be found online, and the company that I got the fanny pack is from MyaBetic and they've got a lot of stuff. Just a little warning that you have to think before you leave.

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As a Diabetes Educator and Nutritionist I help my patients cope with managing their diabetes - whether it's diet, nutrition, supplements, blood sugar, or pump therapy.

Please reach out and contact me if you need support, I truly understand. I live it every day.

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