I am a type I diabetic for 35 years and now have gestational diabetes with my second pregnancy. Upon recommendations from my great maternal fetal medicine team I have started using the tandem t-slim pump in conjunction with my CGM. This is the first time I have ever used a pump. I am having to change out my cartridge every 36 hrs and I will most likely have to change it out sooner and sooner as my pregnancy progresses. Can I reuse my supplies with the pump, cartridge, tubing etc.? It is getting very expensive to be going thru my supplies this quickly!!
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I don’t change my tubing ot cartridge every time. you should check with your doc/CDE on this, but meanwhile, we recently had a coversation about this here
as we say here, YDMV (your diabetes may vary)
Hi. I too am paying for Dex & pump supplies & had the bright idea of reusing cartridges. My bg spiked for two weeks until i realized i was adding fresh insulin to a cartridge that had insulin which had degraded. The cartridge is the cheapest of the supplies so i stopped doing that. I don’t see how you could reuse tubing, etc so maybe you can explain. Everyone is different so you might be able to wear an infusion set longer but i agree: get prof advice 
I’m not sure about other pumps but T slim tells you not to do that because the reserve is made out of a plastic bag and the insulin starts to degrade after three days. I do sometimes leave mine in longer than that but I would not start injecting into an old cartridge. sometimes I’ve left them on as long as 4 to 5 days because I don’t use that much insulin and it has been all right but there are other times where it seemed like it was starting to go bad maybe.
I’m a little confused about what you’re saying- did you start out with gestational diabetes and then you were diagnosed type 1? Or are you saying your type one and now you have gestational
diabetes? I’ve never heard of that.
I started out with type 1 ( diagnosed at age 6) and was then diagnosed with gestational diabetes while being pregnant. It was pretty crazy to me that I could have two types of diabetes. Essentially it means that my body has become insulin resistant while being pregnant and so I use 4x the amount of insulin I would use normally. Can’t wait to have this baby and get my “normal” life back.
Thank you for the conversation link.
Potentially you could bolus some via manual injection. Downside is the pump would not know about the IOB so you would have to take that into account the next time you bolus if within 3 or 4 hours depending on what you have the insulin duration set to.
But maybe manually inject for lunch and dinner would be enough to let the Tandem cartridge last what you would consider more reasonable?
If cost is an issue you probably can’t get much cheaper than manual injection.
This is a very weird way of putting it (by your caregivers). Exponentially increasing insulin resistance as the pregnancy progresses is a common experience by all T1D women (myself included) according to all clinical guidance you read on the issue. In all the literature I have read (let me know if you want any references) nobody calls this “gestational diabetes” on top of the T1. If I were you, I wouldn’t think about it that way either – not that it should affect your management recommendations.
As far as your question about making the pump supplies last you longer – does the T-slim offer different size reservoirs? I am not familiar with that pump, but my Medtronic pump uses either 1.8U or 3U ones and if a person uses the larger (longer-lasting) one they can try to change the site less frequently too. My own approach is to only change sites when I need to change reservoirs, which until now has meant every 6-7 days. But I wouldn’t do that if I notice occlusions or anything else that challenges my control.