In my travels around the information superhighway recently I came across something I’d never heard of in relation to diabetes – the i-port. I have no idea if these are available in NZ but if they had been when I used to be on MDI I would have signed up straight away!

For the un-initiated, the i-port (see the image on the left) is a sort of catheter invented by a fellow type 1 in the U.S. It’s much like the insertion sites you use as an insulin pumper – it’s a little stick-on site which you change every three days which has a needle which goes under your skin into your subcutaneous, and where you can deliver insulin. As you can see from the pic, you simply put the syringe in the port – no fresh needle insertion.

At the end of my MDI stretch I was injecting as much as eight or nine times a day. To be able to use a port like this to pierce my skin once every three days versus 24-27 times, I would have been over the moon. Nice work Patton Medical!