Hi,
@Jordan Kehoe , and welcome to a club you weren't consulted with about joining!
You mentioned libre. Definitely go for it if finances allow. CCGs are going to take a while catching up with it, so, for now, it's paying for it.
With strips, you're just getting a snapshot of where bg is at that point in time. It tells you nothing about where it's been or where it's going.
Libre/cgm is more like a 24 hour movie. We're dealing with a constantly moving target, so it just makes it a much fairer game to be able to see how it's moving in more or less real time and respond to that. Levels the playing field a lot.
With strips alone, we often find ourselves reacting once bg has gone seriously out of range, which often requires a sledgehammer approach, whereas with cgm, we can see things starting to trend out of range and then take small, subtle steps to tweak it back on track without any drama.
With strips alone, you'll often not know about a hypo until it happens, then you might overtreat, take too much sugar, end up high, take too much insulin to correct, end up low again, rinse and repeat - rollercoaster.
With cgm, you can very often spot a slow slide which would eventually be a hypo, and pin it with a modest 5 to 10 grams, so it gets nowhere near 4.
I'm reasonably content with being T1 and I attribute that to having libre. I'm a fairly cynical middle aged Scottish guy - most you'll normally get out of me is, "aye, it's no bad" - but I have no hesitation in saying cgm is a game changer.
@therower has recently got himself kitted out with the cgm system dexcom, and has written in other posts about it being a revelation. I agree. We're both saying that after being T1 for about three decades, so this isn't a gimmicky novelty we've been led astray by.
There's an easy and cheap (well, cheapish, about £100) way of turning libre into full on cgm, with hypo alerts for night hypos, but I'll leave that for another post.
I admire your positivity. What I am about to say might read as a dampener on that, but far from it, it's more a way of fore-warning about a pitfall which often happens, and a way to maintain positivity.
We often see newly dx'd take two broad approaches. Some think they're now doomed, but eventually figure out ways of dealing with it. Others, like you, deal with it head on, read everything, learn insulin/carb rules, apply them rigorously, and think they've got a handle on it.
But then some weird stuff happens - unexplained hypos/hypers, the same meal/insulin responding in different ways two days running etc. etc. - and then they become disillusioned.
They're playing by the rules, so why isn't their T1? That's often the point where the previously positive start becoming negative.
It's easy to look at T1 and think about it in terms of precision and accuracy, which suggests control is simple arithmetic. But it's not. It's fine saying that 1u is needed for 10g, but the reality is that as soon as you put some food and insulin in your body, there's hundreds of chemical processes going on which will throw calculations out. We can't measure those.
I think it is important to understand that T1 is inherently unpredictable. Some people might duck for cover on learning that. But understanding that plays a part in maintaining positivity. I put a lot of effort into calculating boluses etc. but I know that it won't always work out right. If it doesn't, I sort it with some insulin or sugar.
All in all, I try to keep in mind that provided I'm in range most of the time, I'm massively reducing my chances of complications, so I don't worry too much about the occasional flyer.
I know that the inherent unpredictability will throw careful calculations out, but I accept that as part of what I am dealing with, have cgm ways of dealing with that, so just go with the flow without getting too hung up about it.
That way, I can remain reasonably upbeat about even though I know it won't always go to plan. Watch out for when you start getting frustrated about unexplained things happening, and accept that it's part of the game and not your fault. Managing the flyers is also part of the game.
Sounds like you're into reading up about it. Breakthrough...by Thea Cooper is a fascinating book about the discovery if insulin. Sugar Surfing by Stephen Ponder, and Beyond Fingersticks by William Lee Dubois are good for getting the most out of libre/cgm. They're all in kindle. "Pre-bolusing" and "waiting for the bend" - you ain't in Kansas anymore, Toto! Dubois's book was written in 2009 which is like prehistory in cgm terms - there's an amusing bit where he foresees people being able to see cgm on their phones. That now happens.
If all else fails, google Eva Saxl! Ended up in Shanghai during WWII, insulin supplies cut off after the Japanese invaded. She and her husband Victor made their own from water buffalo pancreata in a makeshift lab after finding some early papers developed from Banting's work. Whenever I feel narked about my T1 misbehaving, I imagine Eva, who I picture as an elderly Jewish grandmother in a Woody Allen movie, giving me a clip round the head, saying, "oy vey, you just go to the chemist to get yours, I had to
make mine!"
.
