670g Question Related to Hormones

This question is geared towards ladies but I’m sure men could help as I could imagine this would be needed for other life changes as well. On the old Medtronic pump I used to simply change my basil rates when my hormones shifted every month but now with the 670g I’m wondering if there’s a way to increase the amount of insulin a users receiving during different cycles? This would of course be needed for only a week period at a time, any suggestions?

The 670g in Auto Mode has no way to manually increase the auto-mode delivery. It just measures your sensor readings and reacts accordingly. Theoretically, it should respond to hormones as they impact your blood sugar/sensor values and auto-adjust your insulin to match. In theory. In a perfect, laboratory-controlled sort of world. Your actual mileage may vary.

The 670g in manual mode is programmed the exact same way as the old Medtronic pumps (though the menus are a bit different, the programming is the same).

So basically all I have to work with in Auto Mode are the Carb Ratio settings with no way to trick it into giving me more insulin during that time of the month? I hope there’s a work around.

I’ve found that automode usually handles my increased basal needs just fine. There are, however, some issues when it comes to dosing for food, but that’s something that I do have control over. I will say, sometimes when it starts to really increase my basal, I do end up with some sticky lows, but I’m constantly checking the CGM, so I tend to catch them before they’re too bad.

Do you know if Auto Mode even uses basal Amy43? I’m still learning so look over me. I was told by the pump rep that it only falls back on basal when you’re outside of Auto Mode? I get this eerie feeling that they are instructed to only advise “safely” so “incompetent users” don’t hypo. It makes my blood boil just thinking about it honestly.

Not in the way we think about it. It gives you microboluses based on a predictive algorithm which uses your CGM values. It’s still giving you insulin in the same fashion as a basal rate (kind of like background insulin), but it is not user programmable. From what I understand, you can change some of the way it gives you insulin by changing your IOB timing, but I’ll be honest here, I have no idea how to tweak it this way as I have not needed this functionality.

My biggest complaint is that there is no easy way to reverse engineer a manual mode basal rate based on your “usual” microbolus values - which usually means that whenever I change my CGM sensor my blood sugars are miserable.

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Yeah, my Auto Mode delivery has me in better control than my manual mode settings. But I don’t know how to reverse-engineer that. So on sensor-change days, everything gets screwed up as I go through the sensor warm-up and the practically inevitable problems with getting the sensor to calibrate cleanly the first time.

I was fortunate in that, even as bad as I talk about her, my Pump Rep tried to get my basal rates in manual mode on target so that when I’m doing a sensor change I fall back to that. I discovered I needed much more insulin with the insulin pump then when using the OmniPods but I can at least say even though I’m running a little higher at least I’m not on a roller coaster. I’m really hoping to find a sweet spot of stability if there is one.

Could you supplement it with a little bit of manual injection? Like, maybe a few units of NPH via syringe? That would be inexpensive.

My only concern with suggesting that is that there’s no way to “tell” the algorithm what you’re doing which could potentially mess with your overall microbolusing - after all, the machine is trying to “learn” your fluctuations. In theory, the pump would assume that whatever fluctuations your injections caused are natural and would then try to correct them anyway, possibly negating the efforts.

What Amy43 said is true even though I’ve actually had that thought before mohe0001. I however am not the person to trust l with injections period so not a good idea for me even if microbolusing wasn’t involved here. I tend to get trigger happy. :no_mouth::grinning: