Whatever happened to all that fruitcake circulating years ago - those things lasted thru lots of regifting - think they must have at least the Twinkie shelf life!
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Ha,
Well given recent political events in the UK and the USAā¦
In all seriousness, I always have a bag with at least four infusion sets, a bag of 20 syringes, spare batteries, a 300ml bottle of Novorapid which I rotate and refrigerate. I also have a Lantus pen if I need to shift from a pump back to a traditional basal/bolus regime long term due to pump failure. Glucose tabs etc and various other bits and pieces.
The quickness with which you can fall into DKA on a pump is the biggest worry for me.
Iāve often had a blocked infusion site, not realised or not had a pump alarm and I always start to DKA within several hours and quickly have to have a large bolus into my deltoid with a 12.7 gauge syringe to bring my sugar down from the insane level itās risen to.
So for me syringes are keyā¦
I was reading an interesting piece that during World War 2 there we stories of Jewish diabetics producing their own insulin from cows and pigs. I think youād need a degree in chemistry and lab though for that one though.
I also read that insulin can be kept indefinitely if it is flash frozen in liquid nitrogen. Whether this is true or not I do not know.
I choose to an 18 month supply of quick acting insulin in rotation and several months of long acting.
I do feel vulnerable being a diabetic to any sort of end of days scenario, probably seems a touch Alex Jones but seems rational to me given our vulnerabilities and requirements.
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Do you know if anyone has ever tried Flash Freezing Insulin in a real world scenario?
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I really hate being utterly dependent on the pharmaceutical companiesāespecially if the SHTF.
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Dan White was guilty, plain and simple, and got what he deserved for murdering our beloved mayor, George Moscone and the great Supervisor, Harvey Milk.
Iāve eaten Twinkies for decades and have never murdered anyone.
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Seriously, I would love to hear more about flash-freezing insulin.
Nobody we know about at leastā¦ 
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Hi,
https://survivalblog.com/two_letters_re_diabetics_in_disasters/
I read a patent was taken out for the process in the 70s .
Ha!
I was actually living there at the time.
I have twice found random pen cartridges of Apidra sitting around that have not been expired but have been sitting out at room temperature for who knows how long. Both times, the insulin definitely did not work as well for me. It worked, sort of, but was definitely much weaker, enough so that I ended up throwing out the cartridges and going with new stuff.
Did you find that the insulin was weaker at all? Iāve also had Lantus and Humalog each lose potency once, years ago, both during summer (although we donāt get extremely hot temperatures here).
Still, in an extreme emergency, weaker insulin is better than no insulin.
Iāve pushed it far beyond that just to see whatād happen and have never seen insulin go bad instantly shortly after the 1 month that itās been out of the fridgeā¦ never even anything close to it really. I inconsider it much more durable than the labels would have us thinkā¦
Iām guessing a lot has to do with temperature variations, humidity, and average temperature.
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Yeah Iād imagine soā¦ and my general sense of how the FDA works and dictates labeling is they probably took the very worst possible conditions, most erratic temperature variations, direct sunlight etc etcā¦ measured until they saw the tiniest trace of decreased effectiveness, then applied some nonsense like divided that time by 4 and declared that you should throw the insulin away at that point
Note-- tresiba is approved by FDA to be kept at room temp (up to 86f which is warmer than other āroom tempā definitions Iāve seen for insulin) for up to 8 weeks, or 56 daysā¦ thatās the fdas approval Iām sure in actuality and at slightly lower temps it would last much much longer
Looks like this is the basic process. On one hand, for a bottle of Advil Iād take my chances. But i actually get the logic of ensuring reliability for insulin. I mean, imagine a situation where a person is getting an infection or has a site going bad and their insulin is going bad too ā that could easily spiral into a DKA situation.
Itās possible it was weaker, but I donāt really know. When I tested it as a part of an emergency stash, I just wanted to see if it would work. And it did. When I used unrefrigerated insulin in college, it was a less sophisticated time. No CGM or calculators or any of that. If you were above 200, you took insulin. If you were below 70, you ate.
But I do know that I used unrefrigerated insulin for months, and I was able to eat and live. And I never went to the hospital for DKA. So from that perspective, it worked!
For clarification, I have used unrefrigerated Humalog and NPH, but never tried it with Lantus.
I agree. I have a vial of insulin that expired in 2013, but has been in my fridge the whole time. I took it out, and will keep it at room temp for a few months and see how it works. Iāll let you know.
DISCLAIMER: This is a bad idea, nobody should do this, nobody should listen to me, I break the diabetes rules.
I guess I just donāt really consider it taking a chanceā¦ insulin is the only critical medication that I can think of that the end user verifies its effectiveness multiple times each and every day at home with their own lab test (bg testing). If it doesnāt work, itās obvious. Iād rather get a sense of the realities of those expectations before a shtf situation instead of during
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Thatās totally your choice as an individual, but Iām glad the FDA or someone has done a pretty thorough study of drug degradation rates so that the information is out there for whoever wants to use it, and so that people who are not medically savvy have a reliable product with clear instructions that limit risk.
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But itās an experiment. So I donāt think itās a bad thing to do at all. Experimenting is our life.
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Yes! Every dose is an experiment, right?
But I put in the disclaimer because ofā¦you knowā¦
