Ladies and Gentlemen, I am pleased to announce that after taking on board lots of tips and advice from your good selves and those over on t’ other side of the pond on the insulin pump forum…
I’ve had a silhouette in my hip for 4 hours, I have eaten a meal, taken the appropriate bolus, and my post meal BM is….. (drum roll) …… 5.3!!!!! Wahoo!!
For the benefit of anyone scouring the web for help on this kind of issue here’s what I did…
1. Insert the Silouhette by hand without the clumsy inserter thingie. You have much more control so you can choose the insertion angle easier and it makes it easier to pinch your skin up too. I found it far, far less painful to insert it manually than fire it in with the weirdy shooter thing too.
2. When you change sites leave the old cannula in for an hour, that way any basal (or bolus) that may have been going in or pooling around the old site has plenty of time to absorb so there is no risk of some of it leaking out as you remove the old cannula.
3. Try @mustard‘s suggestion and over prime. If you’re pretty insulin sensitive don’t go too mad but instead of priming the Silhouette by 0.7 I did 1u. I figured if I was going to be monitoring my sugars after anyway it’s less hassle to have to have a sweet/biscuit/swig of lucozade if you drop a bit. I’ll experiement with this to work out what is the right number for me but this time 1u seemed to do the job.
4. I also waited 35 mins between when I gave my bolus and eating. After my meal bolus I kept checking my sugars every 10 mins and figured as soon as it showed any sign of dropping I’d eat. It stayed very steady for 25 mins then then dropped from 7.0 to 5.6 in 10 mins so I figured I’d better get my brekkie down me (and I was proper hungry by this point too!)….
It ‘s stayed at 5 somethiig since. I think this probably means I have a much longer absorption rate in my hip than my tum, but as long as I know this I can just leave longer between bolusing and eating whenever I site in my hip – will continue to monitor.
Thanks so much for your help and support – it’s just nice to know that other people ‘get it’ when you have a bit of a moment! The moral support was enough to make me step back and give it another go rather than give up all together on trying alternative sites.
Just gotta keep my fingers crossed it stays like this now!