One piece of cycling equipment I'm looking to procure is a small, inobtrusive frame pump. While for myself, I'm OK carrying spares and a compressed carbon dioxide (CO2) inflator, this doesn't help much if I find myself as I did last summer, trying to assist a young man who had a blowout on a poorly-maintained BMX-style bicycle en route to work.
For the non-cyclist, the basics are this: my spare tubes were the wrong size for his bicycle. I had patches, but no way to tell where his tube might have had a leak. The compressed carbon dioxide inflator (which works on the same principle as home soda makers and whipped cream makers) doesn't provide the sort of short bursts of gentle pressure I need to find and fix a punctured tube.
Why, you may ask, am I worried about being able to assist someone else while I am riding?
Aside from the whole "karma" issue (and the fellow in question didn't have the money to engage a repair shop, nor the English language skills to negociate the repair), enough of the local two-wheelers engage in unsafe (or illegal) cycling behavior that I figure the more I can do to keep them riding safely, the safer I am on the roads we share.
As people with diabetes, we occasionally find ourselves "our brothers' keepers" in terms of lending a spare lancet, test strip, meter, or ketostick — or occasionally, a spare bottle of insulin or a fresh infusion set. We are directly confronted with an issue striking an individual we know (or are about to become much better acquainted with!), and if we are able to help, we understand that it's a matter of their safety — possibly even to the point of life and death — and that Deities forbid, we may find ourselves in the same position some day.
That said, most of us don't walk around with spare test strips for every brand of meter, infusions sets for every model of insulin pump, or needles for every model of insulin pen. On the other hand, most of us do walk around with a tube (or bottle) of glucose tabs that can be used to treat any person with hypoglycemia — just like a patch-and-pump kit can help almost anyone with a flat bicycle tire.
And on a long ride, there's no telling if I might run out of spare tubes or CO2 cartridges.
