I am so excited and scared. Thursday is our Omnipod Saline start for my 13 year old daughter almost on the 1 year anniversary of her diagnosis. Is this going to be hard for us? I just got the whole MDI thing down really well including the whole exercise , when to pull back on insulin when to give carbs thing.
How labor intense will this be?(The insulin start is 5 days later) I was not able to get all the days off from work I think I will need. Have a good friend coming with us so she is on board and knows whats going on also. How long does it really take to get the hang of this. Do they change her basal rates alot in the begining? Will I see crazy numbers at the start. (though we have had some crazy numbers this last week just because she has a cold) I know there is a learning curve in the begining. Quite frankly not to worried about my daughter as she is so great and fairly tech savvy. Im like really nervous for some reason. Guess its the unknown and how to deal with pod problems etc.
I suspect that she (and you…) will really like it? I was taking R/N (in 2008, long story, see my page as I have it there if you are curious…) when I got my pump and could tell the difference immediately!! It was like night and day. The whole time in the training I was thinking “2 tacos or 3 tacos?” for lunch, as it was 2 hours from 10:00 until noon. I picked 3 and was @ 85 2 hours later and was like “k’ching!”. The other thing that I really liked about the pump and, later, the CGM, was the dramatic improvement in the quality of my data, in terms of being able to spot fluctuations and make adjustments to things. I am not sure I’m the best example because my pump experiences have been bound up with a number of midlife crisis type of activities but overall, it has really improved things across the board in terms of diabetes and is a lot less work so I have been able to enjoy a lot more time doing other things more easily due to the flexibility!
Thanks acidrock23 (love the handle by the way!) we are hoping for better control with the pump as our a1c’s have gone up a little. and she is really excited about not having to give injections like 5 times a day.
I have found it easier to hit decent A1C results, maybe because of the improved data collection but I also found the insulin delivery quite a bit smoother than the R/N shots. The being lazier is a huge plus too. Before I felt like I was either low, going to be low, recovering from being low or mysteriously not low for a while. On the pump, the data seems to make much more sense. For me at least, it’s sort of OCD in that I’m always trying to kick it’s butt and beat every test. I’m sure a psychiatrist could have a field day with me but the pump makes it much easier both to make adjustments and see how things are going but also to fix them when they are off. I think that people, even cough cough middle aged men, continue to change, sometimes it takes more insulin to do the same job and a small adjustment of .05U/ hour can nudge me in the right direction and improve things.
So, like do you do all your own adjusting/tweaking, as far as your basal rates , carb ratio’s etc?
Usually I do. Recently however, I had a wierd incident (see blog…) and ended up with the doc requesting my password for the MM data gizmo and I said “oh, what the heck” so now she, through her Nurse, is requesting weekly updates. She suggested turning down a couple of numbers but I’ve turned down a bunch more. I presume she’d find that ok but I’m not 100% sure if there might be some peevishness that I messed up their experiment by turning down a bunch of other numbers? We’ll see. Or maybe we won’t. I also emailed them the stuff so they can get into my Garmin Data online as I’d sort of like them to consider the exercise thing in their “deliberations”.
Last week I both ran the highest weekly mileage I’d ever run and my fastest 5 mile run ever so I’m working out pretty hard? Last night, I was wiped out from the busy father’s day festivities and didn’t eat anything and was nice and tidy at bedtime so I just let 'er ride and ended up a bit low this AM so I turned both of the nighttime basal rates down again. We’ll see what happens tonight if I can lay off the evening snack? I think that we change all the time and that it seems more apparent with the CGM/ Pump combo than it ever was for me on shots. I think also that a lot of metabolic stuff happens during your early 20s and that I really wish I had a pump then. I hope it works out well for you and jojojr!!
Since you really exercise hard, ie I assume you are a runner, do your numbers actually go up during and immediately following exercise( my daughters do) she is like 250-290 then she crashes like 3 hours later. Just curious. I know this happens because of all the adrenalin during exercise. So we wait to cover her.
They do although I have been working on “beating” that by turning off the “temporary basal” cut to 50-75% (depending on conditions, etc…) w/ 2 or 3 miles to go so that in the 15-20 minutes those milles take, the pump is pumping insulin which starts to hit as I walk in the door? It seems sort of wierd but I think that it works pretty well for me.