Basal testing

Hello Candyman,

You would need to do some fasting tests and check your bg at regular intervals to see if your bg is rising or fallen in the absence of food and quick acting insulin......your DSN will advise you on how best to approach this.

As for your control it might be worthwhile asking about a carb-counting course such as DAFNE (dose adjustment for normal eating).....coming from Leeds I'm sure they'll be courses in your area.

Best wishes!

Basal management for pumpers and MDIers are quite different. As a pumper, I can control my dosage every half hour, and I can easily modify it with temporary adjustments and boluses. Lantus is a long acting insulin - inject and hope.

I recommend you try to understand your tendencies but I don't think you need to document every hour of the day like I have. Divide it in to four chunks - sleeping, morning, midday, and evening. First, you should find your low points, the time of day or night when your BGs drop the most. Often this is at night while sleeping, but for many the sleeping hours are the opposite - they go high. Some stay flat. Nearly everybody rises in the morning and drops in the afternoon. The evening varies quite a bit. I drift high. The easiest way to do this is to skip meals and test every hour or rent/borrow a CGM.

My plan, should I ever stop pumping, is to set my Lantus dose to cover my 2am - 4am crash zone. If I go any higher, I get in to serious trouble. Of course this will leave me running very high at dawn and after dinner, so I plan to cover these periods with fast acting insulin. It is work, and most won't want to wake at 5-6am to bolus.