Hi
@kellie lees,
First up, welcome to you and your husband to this site.
There are a number of us have been on insulin for more than 30, 40 or 50 years.
And on insulin pumps for some of those years !!!
And we come from a number of different countries.
Are you and your husband in the UK? That matters as the accessibility to pumps and
choice of pump etc varies from country to country.
I am from Australia - been on insulin for 52 years, 6 1/2 of those on an insulin pump.
I have never used the Libre - but have tried one of the Continuous Glucose Monitoring ones(CGMs)
which connects remotely to my pump.
I am not sure that Libre can link with an insulin pump and leave that to those expert in such matters
such as
@tim2000s.
I was placed on an insulin pump due to difficulty managing night-time hypos despite 8 plus insulin
injections of short (bolus) and long (basal) insulin per day.
No diet known to me then helped either. The pump helped stop hypos and improved my diabetes control.
For example the rise in BSL at around 3 to 4 am in the morning mentioned by
@Chas C (see Home page
go to question box - right upper corner - type in Dawn Phenomenon) can be controlled by programming the
pump to infuse more insulin to deal with that - and without me having to wake up to deal with it.
Having said that, there are some realities about pumps to consider:
some of us have trouble with the cannulas - the needles that reside under the skin (just like the needles in the
Libre sensors) but these ones allow insulin to be infused. Any kink, bending of the cannula can stop the infusion.
People who are thin seem to have more difficulty with this as the cannula may hit muscle etc.
Infusion stops or is slowed and BSLs go up - I become
prone to ketones developing much quicker than when I was on multiple daily injections. Since moving to metal
cannulas this problem has been far less.
pump failures - I have never had a pump fail - but it does happen and there have been reports of some people
having up to 4 (one and then 3 replacements) fail before changing brands.
Others with the same brand have had sterling service from them.
Not a total panacea: despite the wonders of the pump my BSL control was not optimal. The DAPHNE approach
did not work for me nor for that matter did any diet approach in the past 50 plus years).
It was only by going to a Low Carb High Fat diet that I obtained the BSL control I craved.
I would suggest you look at all combinations of pump and diet regimes: ask on here for references to articles etc
if you need them, ask your health team and be fully informed so that you can (both) make the best choice.
It is tricky to know exactly what you wish to know further without going into pages of text here.
But know that you are both welcome to ask whatever questions you wish and learn at whatever pace suits you
- we have all asked the seemingly obvious questions so no question is ever too simple or obvious to ask.
Best Wishes and please bring on the questions for us all to provide our experience and
what we have learned from our mistakes.!!
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