Accu Chek Combo

I started in November of 2012 after 20 years of MDI and after *several* years of thinking that a pump was not for me.

What convinced me in the end was the opportunity to get my basal to behave properly for the first time ever – and also the precision and ease of bolusing etc, fancy schmancy bolus waves to a letter extent too.

Do be prepared to have to put some work in – it could take a good few months to set it up… tweak… retweak… feel optimistic… lose heart… want to throw it out of the window… before you see real genuine improvements. You might be lucky and things could just click, but without some fairly heavy-duty systematic testing it’s just an expensive lump of plastic giving you duff advice.

When it works though… it really can be fantastic.

As an example, on a day where I’ve been to the gym *and* walked to the supermarket so far I’ve had:
5.2 … 4.6 … 4.3 … 4.1 (these include pre and post meal levels, and I’ve not had any hypos).

Now those are just a bit low for comfort, but the beauty of a pump is that I can just dial-down my basal by a few % for a few hours to take the edge off.

Oh… and if noone has recommended it yet, get hold of a copy of ‘Pumping Insulin’ by John Walsh. Very practical and with lots of nitty gritty detail/tables/calculations to help with set-up and review.

Hope it goes well!

Well, as a starter for ten there are three billion articles about pumps here: http://www.shootuporputup.co.uk/tag/pump/ 🙂

Like @Mike says, it’s a lot work – I found I had to “re-learn” diabetes. Everything I did on MDI went out the window. However, I found I was pretty stable within a few weeks and mastered it within a few months. Now I couldn’t live without it!

I think this is possibly quite a useful article if you want / need encouragement:

Great expectations met

Incidentally… In my ramble I meant to say ‘lesser extent’. I’m not sure what a ‘letter extent’ is, except that these days it is likely to be divisible by sheets of A4.