Yes, that was definitely a big driving force for me too for getting on the pump. Thanks for your reply!
Thanks @Tnyc. I do think I tie my sense of self worth and “goodness” to how my numbers are. It’s a losing game all around.
That’s a good point. Seems a little safer than to deliver an bigger dose all at once.
Wow, thank you for such a detailed response! Did you eventually decide to use exclusively steel cannulas as well?
Yes it’s frustrating. But. While on the pump, I’ve realized that I needed to make diet changes, despite that I was following my endocrinologist’s instructions. I can’t handle more than 30gms of CHO at a time, and 20 is better. Some days I do very very low carb intake and then I’m stable and in control For me. After two years on the pump my H1AC went down somewhat, but the big news was that my retinopathy healed, so that my ophthalmologist couldn’t even see that I’d ever had it, even though she knew from older scans, that I had. Beginnings of glaucoma also disappeared.
It’s worth persevering.
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Yeah, I sort of wish my diabetic educator had explained a lot of these things in more depth or that there was more required training sessions set up. I don’t think I fully understand the way the CIQ functions.
She essentially asked me if I wanted to jump right into using it, and I said yes because I (naively) thought that was a large part of what the pump was for. Meaning, I assumed that I would be doing essentially MDI but having the CIQ on would effectively stop my highs from getting “too high” like 250+. When I was so frustrated last week making this post, I finally realized that I likely don’t have a good grasp on how the pump functions.
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Thank you! I’m so happy that your eye issues were reversed. That’s amazing! 
You’re welcome. Usually people get bored or POd by my long-winded responses. I don’t know when to shut up and it’s easy to run long when I dictate.
I’m using steel cannulas now. If my front side had enough good infusion area I’d use nothing else. But I don’t and I’ve enough neuropathy in my fingers that it’s a challenge to hold the butterfly grip of the TruSteel and reliably insert on my sides where I aim. I keep dropping them. I need to stand so they don’t land on the floor.
I’m considering getting one box of auto-insert on my next reorder so I can try to use sites on my lower back/side without assistance. My wife says I have enough flab and there and should be some unused territory .
You understand how a semi-loop pump system works. It’s exactly the same as if you used a BGM and syringes more frequently, but with better information than you had before. Without that information a pump and CGM are an expensive replacement for syringes and CGM with a bad return on investment. With the right information it can be a stress-relieving convenience that can produce more predictable results more often.
What I and you were missing from our training - which is NOT education- is
that better information. A “diabetes educator” is taught how diabetes works and how to "treat"it. How to operate the controls of a pump is something that they might know. How to use a pump for good or best results is something that is only in the skillset of a few. The odds of a diabetes educator being a pump user are small.
How to teach anything effectively is rarely taught. The best teachers of anything are active learners with “skin in the game” something to lose if they get it wrong. It’s not theory to them, they practice what they teach.
The “algorithm” is like an assistant tailor that follows simple directions to suit you each day, and someone else has already designed the suit. You need to give it your personal measurements or the suit that day won’t fit.
You have to watch what it’s producing, know enough about what it should be doing to tell when it’s not working right, and know what to do when it isn’t. If you pay attention, during a month where it start by making bad suits that don’t fit and need corrections, it will gradually producing ones that fit you a lot better, some perfectly.
After that, if you gain weight or lose it, change sizes, slump when you are tired, break a leg, etc. the suit that day will be wearable, but it won’t fit well.
To understand what a pump needs to know to work as well as it can for you, and how to get that information yourself, I recommend the book, “Think like a Pancreas”, 2020, by Gary Scheiner. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07XCSRB67/. Gary Scheiner has T1D and wears a pump.
If you follow the directions in his book, It’s easier than you might think to figure out your basal rateS one meal period at a time, then your actual carb ratioS by meal for your most frequent breakfasts and lunches. By the time you do that, you should understand how to observe what happens when you eat a variety of dinners.
The only catch is that all your observations have to be done while your sites are good and you aren’t stressed. It may take a week or months to do this, depending on your activity schedule.
Try to be patient and just tackle one small part at a time, starting with your night basal rate. There’s no penalty for needing corrections and you will rarely get perfect results.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
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At the risk of stating the obvious, while pstud’s methods may represent an ideal, they are not required for benefiting from a T-slim with Control-IQ. I mean, the title of this thread is burned out and I feel a touch overtaxed reading such a thoroughgoing approach.
I have never counted carbs. I’ve kinda sorta guesstimated carbs. I’ve never established a fasting basal rate or done any form of calculation to establish ideal basal rates for different times of day. I’ve muddled through. I aim for a healthyish diet, but eat pizza, sushi, candy, fries and all the villains.
My A1c hovers around 6.5 with a TIR of around 80.
I am in no way impugning method and order. Method and order are great and the mental burden spread out over time may in fact be less than my slapdash tactics. I am in no way suggesting that others follow my slapdash ways.
It just kinda sorta feels to me like it’s a big hill. Buy this book, make these calculations (but throw out any calculations that take place while you’re stressed) and in weeks or months…voila! A person might be tempted to have a long lie down before taking on a hill like that…
Scheiner (or Bernstein or Mastering Diabetes) might be the way for foxes, but some people are hedgehogs. There’s no getting around the daily burden of diabetes. Advanced study and methods are great, but I don’t think anyone should be left with the impression that they are required.
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In any body of knowledge that one seeks to acquire there exist active learning periods interspersed with assimilation and integration time. You need the rest and slower pace of this assimilation and integration period.
Our bodies remind us of this rhythm of learning by the appreciation of sleep on the learning cycle.
When you learn about ways of controlling BGs with insulin, dosing based on carb content, for instance, you are operating in a more stressful way, given the new tactics you learned.
But then those new tactics become old habits and the stress goes way down. To use @Tnyc’s language, you effectivefully migrate from fox to hedgehog. This is the power of learning new effective tactics.
No-one likes to use new learning continuously; it’s a rhythm that varies from person to person.
I’ve learned much about dosing insulin for me. My use of advanced gear like an automated insulin dosing system would clearly place me into the fox category.
But, nothing could be further from the truth. I spend little to no time quantifying carbs (or fat or protein, for that matter) to decide my dose.
I have gone through many periods of fox-like learning but have quickly migrated to the more comfortable and sustainable hedgehog mode.
I don’t advocate that anyone stand pat in their diabetes knowledge. Learn a little every day and continuously see if that knowledge will work for you. Learn at your own pace but still try to learn.
The more you learn, the easier it is to exercise that knowledge. No-one can move at fox speed for very long!
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A hedgehog knows “one big thing”. I don’t know what “one big thing” might be for a T1 using insulin. I think someone who can eyeball carbs accurately is an especially clever fox 
An alternative framework is materiality. I know some of us believe in constant improvement - no matter how good one’s control is today our job is to improve it tomorrow. Others believe that once a certain level of control is attained, further improvement isn’t necessary.
It’s important to be kind to ourselves. I know when I hit a rough stretch, I remember what a former member of TuD told me - going over 200 isn’t going hurt you in the short term. We almost always have time to relax and get back on track.
Maurie
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I’ve never understood doing a sloppy job on anything important. Nothing is more important to me than my health. My life literally depends on it. I’ve also never understood not using a tool to get the best results it’s capable of delivering. At this point in my life, a semi-loop system is an expensive convenience, not a substitute for a caring mind.
The better you’re able to establish a stable and productive routine based on understanding, the easier it is to maintain. I’m familiar enough with the fallibility of technology that for me it’s less stressful to manage my diabetes in a way that I could sustain with a similar level of results without a CGM or pump. Those “power tools” are expensive conveniences.
When I was younger, I was willing to do “good enough for today” management of my diabetes and let “someone else” worry about it. As I got older I recognised that no one else cared enough to worry, and if they did, they were never around when I needed help… A closed loop pump system doesn’t even know that I’m alive. If I died, it would keep working the same until the battery was drained, sounding alarms that it was low on insulin or a meal bolus was missed - with no one to hear. I can imagine the autopsy " …The body had a blood glucose level of 110 mg/DL at 10:37am, when the last manual bolus was given. Time of death impossible to determine due to delayed discovery, but probably before breakfast because of the missed meal bolus. "
l’m incapable of blindly and ignorantly entrusting my remaining life to any tool. I try to learn how to use any tool I can use to the best of its capability before I use it to make my life easier. That didn’t happen with the t:slim+G6. I rapidly learned within days how fragile and undependable it is. When it works right, it’s great. The other 30% of the time it’s not so great. For three weeks I spent more time learning how to troubleshoot problems and adjust it to match the decades of results that I’d had getting without it, than the system saved me. That reversed during the fourth week. For me that’s an extraordinarily long learning curve. I don’t see any reason for another person needing to duplicate my mistakes to learn what I did.
I recognized that I can use the same information that would allow Control IQ to achieve its best results when it does work, manually when it fails. Learning how to program a dumb system helped me learn to be smarter about managing my diabetes, and getting the parameters right could be done easily within a week. If I’d had the right teacher, I could have been using MDI and BGM more effectively for decades,and extended my healthy lifespan.
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Eyeballing carbs them sounds painful and I’m not a hedgehog. I know a lot of big things and many more small ones and I never stop learning and experimenting.
What might separate me from many other persons with T1D is that everything I’ve learned has been organized, and when possible measured, quantified and documented.
It’s amazing how much ignorance, erroneous, irrelevant and missing information is discovered in the process of creating good documentation.
We use a digital scale and package labels at home. We make standard meals where we know closely what’s in them for net carbs. I can tell by entree how many grams of carbs are in a home dinner and when a substitute is made, all I need to know is the change. My short (5’4") order cook is great to work with, didn’t take long to train.
I brown-bagged lunches most of my working life. Eating away from home has always been guess and correct later, and while I have a pocket size digital scale, I rarely need to use it.
I think you meant to respond to Tnyc but -
We’re all different - like you I use a digital scale at home; unlike you I didn’t put months into working with CIQ to spend more effort trying to get the same results I was getting just using the pump, the G6 and my brain. I use G6 overnight because it improves my sleep - a big plus. I get good TIR and a “normal” A1c most of the time.
Stepping back and accepting less than stellar results when we’re having a hard time is not being slapdash. It’s not beating ourselves up and preparing to get back to where we want to be.
Maurie
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By fox, I meant believing that there’s one right way to use a pump/manage diabetes and more generally being disciplined and rigid.
By hedgehog, I meant picking up tips here and there and more generally being improvisational and flexible.
Introducing those critters was pretentious on my part and I didn’t even use the terms precisely so I apologize.
We can probably agree that living successfully with type 1 requires both discipline and improvisation.
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That is more or less the opposite of Isiah Berlin’s use of the terms in his famous essay. Sorry to have misunderstood you.
My mistake. Sorry.