Different clinic's have a different protocol the start of pumping.
Some clinics start their pumpers of using saline for several days or perhaps a week, so when you inject (with the exception of your background) you also make a bolus with the pump
Other Clinic's prefer to go live straight away (this is what I did) the procedure for doing this will be slightly different dependant on how you inject your background insulin..
If you are on a single injection that you take at night, you will be asked to reduce the injection the night prior to starting the pump.
If you have a split injection AM and PM, then you be asked to take your PM injection the night prior to starting the pump as normal, but miss your morning injection...
You don't actually go without insulin as such, as it does actually take a couple of days for your old background insulin to burn completely out of your system. So for the first couple of days, the BG testing you'll be doing will be for monitoring purposes rather than data collection... Then you start collecting your data that enables you to make adjustments to your basal, but when you start this do remember that make one adjustment at a time, make to many in one go you won't know which one worked and which didn't!
Your clinic will also ask you for your last 3 days or so TDD of insulin, they use this information to work out a starting correction dose, and also for background insulin, again here different clinic's have different protocol. some clinics just divide your background insulin evenly over 24 hours, other clinic's will look at your BG Data, and use this to guide them make a variable basal to start off with.
