@Wjohn Hi John, my last reply was a little rushed so I’ll go into more detail with this post.
Basically the 780G is like an artificial pancreas if you are running it alongside the Guardian 3 CGM sensors. The pump will automatically shut off insulin when it senses you going low & give you an alarm, it’ll also automatically give you correction insulin if your blood glucose levels start to raise. What that means is your carb counting doesn’t have to be a perfect science & you can be a little bit off every now and then. The 780G also automatically gives you ALL of your basal insulin, you don’t have a set amount per day like you do with insulin pens. The pump adjusts your basal rate every 5 minutes to keep your glucose in range.
If you don’t use the guardian 3 sensors then you will lose all of these features & basically just have a insulin pump that needs to give you a set amount of basal per day like your insulin pen & it will only give fasting acting insulin when you tell it to when you eat. No automatic correction doses & no basal adjustment every 5 minutes.
As for costs, you will need to pay for the sensors for as long as your using the pump. If you take out a plan with Medtronic it costs £1820 for a years supply of sensors which also includes the transmitter which usually costs £500 on its own. The sensor needs to be changed every 7 days & in all honesty coming from a 26 year old it can be very fiddly. When you first insert a new sensor you will need to calibrate it after 6hrs, after that you’ll need to calibrate every 12hrs at a minimum. What I mean by calibrating is you check your blood glucose with a blood test like you normally would and tell your pump the results. This is basically just to make sure your sensor isn’t a mile out compared to your blood glucose results.
Now I will be completely honest, these sensors can be really frustrating & it’s certainly not as easy as inserting a sensor and leaving it in for 7 days then changing it for a new one. These sensors can randomly decide to fail, the pump can decide it doesn’t want to accept a calibration and it’ll keep asking for one every 15 minutes until it accepts. You will without a doubt get alarms going off from your pump at 2/3/4am asking you to get out of bed & do a blood test for no reason whatever.
I would not recommend using the 780G without the sensors because it is an amazing piece of kit, my time in range over the last 14 days is 97%. My a1c in January was 83 & it’s now 45. The kit really is amazing!
Luckily for me I get the pump & sensors fully funded.