5. If you have health insurance, call your health insurance company and ask for a supervisor; then ask them to assign a dedicated case manager to your case. This way, every time you have a problem with the insurance company, you will have the same person to ask for help each time. Of course this is NOT something I did, but I wish I had. I found out that you can do this about a year after my child was diagnosed. If you do not have health insurance, call your state’s insurance commissioner’s office to find out about special programs for the uninsured. The social services department should be helpful as well.
6. Keep track of your child's prescriptions. Look into using a prescription mail order service and obtain two copies of prescriptions from your doctor—one to fill immediately at the local pharmacy and one to mail out, to receive three-month's worth of supplies from the mail oder if they’ll give it to you. (We occasionally have problems with the mail order so it’s great to have a prescription on file at a local pharmacy if we need something ASAP.) You can save money by ordering diabetes supplies by mail order, and you can save time if the service has online access. If so, stock up on extra supplies for the school, grandma's house, etc. My mail order service charges extra for expedited shipping, but if you order insulin with the other prescription, it is expedited for free.
7. Make a trip to the grocery store. Here's a list of snacks: sugar-free Jell-O and popsicles, hard-boiled eggs, low-fat cheese sticks, nuts. These are foods that your child won't need a shot for if they’re hungry for a snack, and the fewer shots in the beginning the better. Things to get for treating low blood sugars: flavored glucose tabs, small Cakemate tubes of icing, rolls of Sweet Tarts or Smartees and juice boxes. For general care: alcohol wipes for injections and spot band-aids, because until their fingertips get calluses, they tend to bleed a bit. (Both the wipes and the band-aids are non-prescription so they won't come with the mail order stuff.) You’ll also want to put a stash of snacks in the car, so you don’t have to hit convenience stores quite so often. Load up on snacks that won’t melt in the sun or freeze in the winter: peanut butter crackers, trail mix, Combos and Ritz Bits for a good protein/carb mix, and rolls of Sweet Tarts and Smartees for treating lows in a traffic jam. Don’t keep juice boxes in the car. Even though they don’t have to be refrigerated, they expire, go bad in the heat, and can explode when stepped on by siblings. And you can’t see that there’s a problem with the juicebox until the kid has a mouthful of moldy juice.
