The more I talk to people, the more I realize they haven’t got a clue — and these are very educated people, very technology minded and sometimes even medical people.<\/p>\n
First, the pump only pumps insulin. It’s only a pump.<\/p>\n
The pump holds a given amount of insulin. Some cartridges hold 200 units, some hold 300 units.<\/p>\n
It pushes the insulin down the tubing and into a cannula — a small piece of plastic tubing that is inserted into the skin with a needle. It’s slightly worse than a regular insulin injection and loads better than a cortizone injection in the foot.<\/p>\n
The pump doesn’t do anything “automatically”. You program it to deliver a basal dose. Mine is around 1 unit an hour, and the pump divides that into how every many times it delivers insulin an hour. So you get a fraction of that insulin every few minutes. This replaces the long acting insulins, which use chemical to slowly release the insulin.<\/p>\n
You also have to enter a bolus for whenever you eat depending on your insulin to carb ratio. Thus, if I want to eat 40 carbs, I divide by 8, and program the pump to give me 5 units of insulin. Rapid acting insulin works about the same speed as metabolisming the average meal.<\/p>\n
My goal, throughout the day, is to keep my blood sugars as stable as possible. If the basal amount is programmed correctly, my blood sugar will stay within 20 points, provided I don’t eat. <\/p>\n
If I calculate my meal correctly — and there are variables on that — my blood sugar should be in the 140 range two hours after a meal.<\/p>\n
Therefore, what I do, is throughout the day, check my blood sugar with a normal, over the counter blood sugar device, and make sure that my blood sugars are in the right range.<\/p>\n
There are several factors that can through it off ….<\/p>\n
First, hormones, an being female, hormones especially can cause blood sugars to be erratic. Both internally produced and externally delivered hormones can change blood sugar. <\/p>\n
Stress — which causes hormone and adrenal production (isn’t that a hormone), can also change blood sugar.<\/p>\n
The make up of food — high fat foods tend to slow absortion down, cause the insulin curve to be faster than the food curve — though that can be fixed with an extended bolus. The pump has an extended bolus feature that lets the delivery of insulin be divided by a time period. Works great for pizza and mexican food.<\/p>\n
Pure sugar has the opposite effect. I still get a short sugar buzz off of things like Lifesavers or Gummi Bears. In that case the food gives off sugar faster than the insulin works.<\/p>\n
Just being off on the calculation. Let’s say I go to Wendy’s. Well, if the person serving the fries gives me 3 fries less than what has been measured and recorded in the FDA database, or 3 fries more, I’m going to be off on my carb to insulin ratio.<\/p>\n
And sometimes the database is wrong, or the food doesn’t have the same ingredients.<\/p>\n
Yeah, it isn’t fun, but better than the alternatives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The more I talk to people, the more I realize they haven’t got a clue — and these are very educated people, very technology minded and sometimes even medical people. First, the pump only pumps insulin. It’s only a pump. The pump holds a given amount of insulin. Some cartridges hold 200 units, some hold […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3622","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-status"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kweaver.org\/diabetes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3622","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kweaver.org\/diabetes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kweaver.org\/diabetes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kweaver.org\/diabetes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kweaver.org\/diabetes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3622"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kweaver.org\/diabetes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3622\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kweaver.org\/diabetes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kweaver.org\/diabetes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kweaver.org\/diabetes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}