2.- The beginning, before the pump.
My experience will cover three years long in about a month and a half, but the instructor started teaching me in mid-August until early September, so I could say that there are only 15 days left until the three years are up.
Firstly, I should mention that I had high expectations for a pump that adapts to you after a learning period of at least a week (and this is because Guardian Mode, i.e. the automatic mode that makes decisions for you, needs at least a week's worth of data to be able to make those decisions). As I wouldn't be seeing the instructor every day, only once every 7 to 10 days, I spent more than 10 days in normal mode (Not Guardian mode).
In order to use the pump, you need to enter a certain amount of data:
-how much basal you need at each hour of the day and night. You can even indicate how much you need in minimum periods of 30 minutes. And every time I felt hypoglycaemia at night, I would ‘change’ that table so that Guardian mode would start from there. But be careful, the pump will ignore those values in Guardian Mode (it will start from there but analyses what is happening in your body and makes a weekly balance to recalculate the doses for the following week). And that's partly where its problems come from. From here on, I'll call it GuardianMode.
I used Levemir and rapid-acting insulin and injected myself between five and seven times a day: two Levemir injections, one in the morning and another at noon, and three more just half an hour before meals. The other two were based on the results of blood strip analysis. As my insurance company has always tried to ‘give you the smallest possible number of test strips’ (skimp on them), I couldn't test like crazy (so I never did postpadria/post-meal tests), I only did them before meals to know how much insulin to take, so that was three tests guaranteed. When I was in doubt, for example, if I felt my glucose was low or high, I would do another test, and also if there had been a problem when injecting (sometimes a few drops would come out when I removed the needle, so there could always be too much or too little insulin in my body). During the last pandemic, the person in charge of supervising the test strips decided that I was using too many of them and almost forced me to switch to the Free Style sensor, which I never ended up using because no one told me how to use it properly and because I didn't want to change something that I knew how to use. My diet was fairly consistent, even when I skipped meals, but because I didn't control my postprandial levels, my glucosylate values haemoglobin was very high, sometimes reaching and remaining (between 3 and 6 months) at over 8, even 8.5 (and even sometimes, even more so of this value). Between 7 and 7.5 is not ideal, but it is tolerable. Above that amount is too high. But, at end, this was better to obtain my pump, because in order to be prescribed (and approved by my insurance company), your values must be at least this high or higher for 6 months or more.
Note:
HaemoglobinA1c (HbA1c) (called usually glucosylate haemoglobin and shortening we called only "glucosylated") versus
Glycated haemoglobin (mmol/mol).
Equivalence of values between both:
HaemoglobinA1c (HbA1c) ___versus____Glycated haemoglobin (mmol/mol)
Less than 5.7%. <----------------Normal--------> Less than 38 mmol/mol
Between 5.7 and 6.4%. <-----Pre-diabetes ---> Between 39 and 47 mmol/mol
Greater than or equal to 6.5%.<-Diabetes----> Greater than 48 mmol/mol
