Well, I’ve put on the dunce cap and am now sitting in the corner. Had never used the auto/off function, or been actively aware of it. I just called Insulet to have them explain to me how to enable this function.
This is certainly reassuring to me! There are many a night I go to bed with a normal BG, while having the feeling that I’m going to drop; thus forcing me to ingest more carbs.
So, now with wonderful acquired knowledge I’ll be able to have better control in managing, and, hopefully, avoiding hypos.
Thank you sincerely, all of you, for taking the time to comment and teach me.
What a terrific ad for a CGM! Nothing like a high-pitched alarm for a rapid drop in blood sugar to wake you up! Congratulations on surviving this adventure, but do consider a CGM.
We all carry our own level of ignorance. No need to feel shame. No one knows everything! Now you know about your auto-shut off with your Omnipod system. I’ve “discovered” many pump features over the years that were there all the time, I just didn’t know or didn’t care about them. It took me 25 years of wearing a pump to regularly use extended boluses. To be fair, I don’t think the pumps I used back in the late '80’s featured extended boluses. It’s important to remain open to learning new things about diabetes. And life!
I set my auto-off trigger for 12 hours without a button push. It turns out I never needed this function but it did trigger off a few times when I enjoyed a longer than normal sleep-time combined with waiting several hours to eat once I got up. I think I was alarmed at unexpectedly rising BGs and then discovered the cause was the auto-off being triggered.
If you find that your early morning basal adjustments do not do the trick, you might reconsider using the pod’s auto-off function. Losing a pod early when this happens is a small price to pay for the safety it gives.
Have you ever had it accidentally shut off like @Terry4 just described? How do you restart it? Does it lose settings or is it more like an auto-suspend?
Have never had it accidentally turned off. It’s that I never had it turned on.
For instance, if I had turned the auto/off on and set it for 7 or 8 hours (approx # of sleep hours), it would have sounded alarm in morning, preventing me from going into deeper state of hypo. I’m a light sleeper and, more than likely, would have woken and responded to it. And, if there wasn’t any activity on my part, then, as Terry4 stated, the pod deactivation would have been a very small price to pay.
I’ve been drinking about a pint of water before going to bed for years. I end up waking up and going to the bathroom some time in the middle of the night and I check my blood sugar at that time. Doing so has saved me from innumerable highs and lows. Before I started using a CGM this year, the extra stick helped me understand my overnight patterns a little bit better.
Of course the downside is that I almost never get an uninterrupted night’s sleep.
I like this tactic and have used it from time to time. Mother Nature won’t forget to let you know it’s time to check your BG or at least push a few pump buttons. Most people consider that middle of the night sleep interruption as a mild nuisance but you’ve turned it into a positive!
The minimed pump does an alert when the auto off is going to shut it down. Typically I have checked iob or some other button press just before going to bed. So most often I do some button press in the morning, like a bolus, before 12 hours.
Occasionally I delay breakfast and then 12 hours may pass since last button press. Then I get the alert, a vibration. I press it once to acknowledge and it never really shuts down. It is working immediately when button is pressed.
However, if I go way too low at night, and dexcom fails to alert me, I expect the pump auto off would occur, stop basal, and then my BG would start to rise, or a family member would respond. Settings are not lost. Yes, it is like auto suspend, and resumes immediately with one button press.
162 BG is not that bad really. From what I understand you are on the pump–you could set a temporary basal rate–for 3 hours at 80%–and that may keep you from dropping any more. I have ‘programmed’ my body to wake up around at 2-3 hours to check my BG–if I don’t wake up my husband always check my paper work to see when I checked it last and he will wake me up to do that. You should get your basal rates checked by your doctor, from what I have read this is a major issue with a lot of people, if your basal rate is set correctly you should not have as many issues–but that depends on a thousand other variables–right!
Somewhere there’s a thread on this. I think just about everyone who’s ever been on MDI has done 'em backwards. I know I did once, and I was taking like 50 units of Lantus. I did notice before I’d injected the whole dose, but man, it made for an interesting morning.
Insulin works on me up to 6 hours later and it is sometimes hard to calculate how much more it will drop during the night. During the day it almost never causes a problem as I can eat something if I drop. I don’t make any adjustments from 150-to say around 180. Under 150 I usually will grab a small bite of something in fact. Under 125 I will eat something. I also have to allow for activity level during the day as even my long lasting insulin has to be adjusted for work days. And if it was a more intense work day I want my BG higher to start for the night to be safe.
That must have been scary as heck, JoedyRose. I absolutely hate those nighttime lows. Had one of my worst a couple of weeks ago…32. Managed through it, but between overeating and what it took out of me, lost the next day entirely due to exhaustion.
I’ve often thought about getting a diabetes alert dog, but they’re even more expensive than a CGM, and I can’t afford that either.
Hope you solve whatever your particular problem was that caused this. I’d probably be afraid to go to sleep after that!
