At the last Wednesday’s #GBDOC tweet chat a question and my joke answer got me thinking…
…so I thought I’d write an open letter to Dextro…
Dear Sir/Madam,
Firstly can I thank you from the bottom of my heart for literally saving my 13 year old daughter’s life on so many occasions. You see she has Type 1 Diabetes which in simple terms means her pancreas doesn’t produce any insulin and it involves her having to inject* insulin to match the carbohydrates she consumes for each meal. Sounds simple doesn’t it, but throw in exercise and hormones and growth spurts and the whole process gets tricky. Giving too much insulin means that she’s likely to go ‘hypo’, which means her body will be in a hypoglycaemic state, which is bad news, potentially very bad news, unless it’s treated fast. That’s where you come in.
* luckily she has an insulin pump which makes this job easier for her
My daughter and tens/hundreds of thousands of other people in the UK with Type 1 Diabetes use Dextro Energy to give themselves a glucose boost and bring them out of a hypo. To do this they often consume 15g of carbohydrate. Obviously other sources of carbohydrate are available but in my daughter’s eye Dextro Energy tabs taste the best.
Sorry I’ve just realised that you already know this, you’ve written about it here: http://www.dextro-energy.com/werbrauchtdextroenergy/diabetiker/index.asp
Five Dextro tablets are just right to cover one hypo, but if her blood glucose level is dropping fast they may not be enough and a second lot of five tablets may be needed. If we go out for a day we want to make sure we’ve got enough to cope with three hypos.
3 hypos x 5 tablets = 15 Dextro Energy tablets.
That’s 15.
Number of tablets in one stick of Dextro Energy: 14.
(Just for info the sticks are the only ones we can get in our area.)
So what I ask of you is to consider increasing the number of tablets in each pack by one to 15. I’ll expect the cost to increase by one-fourteenth, that’s fine, but it would make things so much easier. It would mean we wouldn’t have to count how many tablets were left every time we pack the hypo-kit-bag, but more importantly it might mean not find lots of old tablets in ones,twos,threes,fours lying around the house/car/garden/bags/coats.
Thanks for reading this.
Kev.