Caya (28) works as an early years educator and loves anything that makes room for creativity and new experiences, whether that’s drawing, cooking or travelling. She wears her Kaleido in black and silver. Type 1 diabetes has been part of her life for 17 years, and she has been using the Kaleido pump for three months. When asked what art, cooking and travel mean to her, and the answer comes straight away: “Well, a bit of freedom, really. Discovering new things.”
Children, creativity and a bit of freedom
Caya draws, travels and cooks. She has been vegetarian for 19 years, has lived with coeliac disease for 12 years and with type 1 for 17 years, so there is a lot of experimenting going on in her kitchen, and over time that has turned into a real passion. “I think the condition is partly what gave me this passion for cooking, because I simply had to experiment a lot.”
The second constant is her job, which she talks about with real enthusiasm. “Kids are just cool. You can do and experience so much with them. It’s a really lovely job that gives you a lot back, too.”
Seventeen years, and then a decision that helped Caya massively
Caya was ten years old when diabetes came into her life. Because several people in her family have type 1, her mother recognised the signs early and had her blood sugar checked at a routine paediatrician appointment. After that, she spent two weeks in a children’s hospital.
What followed were seventeen years on the pen and an acceptance that took its time. “I’ve only really accepted my diabetes in the last year or two”, she says. What changed that was a decision she made last year: “The pump has helped me massively with that.”
Looking back, the only thing she would change is the timing. “Why didn’t you decide to do it ten years ago?”
One less thing to think about, more room for everday life
What Caya values most is everything she no longer has to keep track of. “It really takes a lot off your plate. You don’t have to think about it all the time, because it can work very independently.” The topic hasn’t gone away completely – her sister also has type 1, and Caya shares a lot of her everyday life on social media – but: “I don’t think about it as much since getting the pump.”
At work, she uses Zen mode mainly for conversations with parents, and she deliberately wears the pump on her stomach rather than her arm, because there are little hands around her all day. The children know about it, and that matters to her: “The more openly I talk about it, the better it is for everyone.” When it beeped recently, the question came straight away: “Is that your pump again?”
Black and silver and ready for new things
Caya liked the look of the Kaleido straight away: “Visually, I thought it was actually pretty cool, because it’s also quite small.”
She chose the colour for practical reasons – black and silver “goes with every outfit” – though next time, orange or pink could be an option. She has tried both tubing lengths: “If you’d rather have something tubeless, the short tubing is actually pretty cool, because it’s almost like a tubeless pump.”
In Mallorca, on her first beach holiday with the pump, she disconnected it to go in the sea and reconnected it afterwards. Was that easy? “Yes, actually, it was.”
Less diabetes on her mind
On top of that, there are features that make everyday life easier for a keen cook, for example with pizza: “Before, you had to inject it in portions. Now there’s this function where you can enter it, and the pump then does it by itself.”
She was also apprehensive about the nights at first, because she didn’t know whether the pump would disturb her sleep: “Now I don’t even notice it anymore.”
Her advice to others
Talk openly with someone, she says, and take your time looking at the options. “I’d recommend it to anyone. It simply makes everyday life easier.”
Ten years earlier would have been nice, but black and silver goes with everything, and there’s still plenty of the world left to discover.