So, count me as ignorant, but I want to make sure that none of you have the same experience.
A few months ago, I was late leaving work for dinner at my GF's house. I got to the train before I realized I left my "pancreas" at work with all my testing supplies and insulin. No worries, I had an old test kit at her house, and I was standing near my pharmacy, so I went in to get a prescription refill. Turns out my Humalog prescription had run out, and they couldn't get the doctor on the phone for a refill authorization, so I told them I'd just take a bottle of R over the counter (Humalog not available without a prescription in California).
They sold me this unusually fat bottle of R, and I thought, "Wow! They sell this in bulk now for people with use very large dosages." And off I went to dinner. I took 10u, had dinner and went for a walk. Felt low, and stopped in a 7/11 for a snack. Went to bed feeling fine, was sure I was high from my snack, but woke up at 3 AM in a lake of sweat with a bunch of paramedics surrounding me for the first time in my 18 years as a T1.
So here's what I discovered. The fat bottle of Regular was Regular U-500 special potency R that is 5X the Regular that most of us use. It is sold to people with extreme insulin resistance, NOT available without a prescription, and is very rare in the US. Instead of taking 10u at dinner, it turns out I took the equivalent of 50u for a relatively light carb meal.
I realize it is unlikely that any of your pharmacies will ever screw up that badly, but it was enough of a shocking experience that I wanted you all to learn from my woes.
Why did you not check the vial when you got it to make sure it was the right kind? Did you not realize something was wrong when they charged you $200+ for it?
They charged me closer to $60, and it has been years since I bought R, so I attributed the expense to inflation/greedy bastards in the drug industry. And, I DID check to confirm that it was R. As I explained, did not know the difference between U-100 and U-500. I thought the fat bottle was a bulk size. As far as I knew it had a big R on it, a person at the pharmacy’s counter with whom I had been doing business with for years handed it to me when I asked for R.
Funny thing is, I was completely mystified as to what happened. I didn’t attribute it to the insulin, just some weird diet/dosage/biochemical hocus pocus. I’ve never had a low that I hadn’t woken up from before, but I know that it happens, so I figured this was just my first. But I went straight back to the city (after a long stop at Denny’s) and got my “pancreas”. I put the R on the shelf in the fridge, and might have used it again but for the fact that I was reading Dr. Bernstein’s book at the time in fits and starts. About a month later, I came across a reference in there to the different sorts of R… then it all clicked into place.
Dinner was at about 730PM… The paramedics left at 330-ish. I left Denny’s around 6. That was 10.5 hours there. I don’t think there was much of an issue with the length of dosage.
No. People make mistakes. This was my mistake, and the clerk at the pharmacy’s mistake. I didn’t suffer permanent damage, and I’m happy to be alive. Live and let live. I just let them know that it was a mistake they couldn’t afford to let happen again, and I got my money back.
