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Hello

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Hello @Sapphire1112,

Thank you so much for joining the Diabetes UK online community forum. Please feel free to join in on some of the conversations and feel comfortable reading as little or as much as you like!
 
Hi Sapphire and welcome

Good to have another experienced T1 on the forum. How are you managing your diabetes. MDI or pump? Do you have Freestyle Libre? What brings you to join the forum after 18 years with diabetes? The members are a great source of information and advice as well as a wonderful support mechanism for those times when things get tough. I hope you find it as valuable and beneficial as I have during the past year since my diagnosis.
 
Thank you all for being so welcoming. I currently carb-count and take 5 injections a day (more if I need correction doses or my insulin runs out in the middle of an injection!) I've been hoping to look into getting a pump as I also have a learning disability - dsypraxia, which makes the carb-counting very difficult despite being sent on courses. I have been looking for advice on whether I would be considered for a pump as I have been told opposite things in the past which is not very helpful!
 
Hi again

Hopefully someone else can tell you more about pumps but I think being able to carb count is equally important with a pump.
I don't know anything about dyspraxia but wonder if you have a cope of the Carbs and Cals book which provides a pictorial guide to assessing carb content of food by showing photos of various sized portions of foods on a plate and their carb content. It is very easy to use and many people treat it like a bible when it comes to carb counting.
 
..... Or you can follow a low carb diet which means that you avoid high carb foods, so the carb counting is easier.
 
Maybe if you say you have difficulty with carb counting, maybe you could ask about a bit more input than the normal.
 
One of our granddaughters has dyslexia and dyspraxia plus a degree of dyscalculia - however her actual mathematics skills are excellent - no trouble recognising numbers and has never found Sudoku a problem despite me being generally useless with that and it was me who happened to be there when she was plodding through a workbook she'd been given to assist her when she was approx. 8 so the Sudokus and other exercises were age appropriate.

She is intelligent and has no prob with the written word as long as someone can read to her. Her understanding of things is 'visual' though. You can show her 30 grams of something and she'll quite easily be able to serve out as many 30gram portions of that as you want, from a huge loose tub of it until she runs out of whatever it is. She trained as a chef and successfully worked in a very busy food pub for quite a while!

So - the carb counting. All insulin pumps will calculate your bolus for you, once you program in to their memory what your insulin to carb ratio is - but you have to tell it how many grams of carb you are about to eat so it can do the calculation. What is it that you actually have difficulty with - is it the calculation, or being able to estimate how big your portion actually is, in order to then estimate the carbs in it?
 
Hello Jenny, dsypraxia affects different people in different ways. My brother who also has it (but doesn't suffer from diabetes) is great with mathematics. Sadly, part of the way it affects me is that numbers have no meaning to me. For me it is also a problem with retaining the information of how to do it and no matter how many times it is explained, I just can't seem to get my head around how to work out the how much insulin I need for the carbs. Sometimes I get it right, sometimes I don't.
 
Well Roche used to make a meter which could calculate the insulin for you for people still on MDI if they didn't want a pump - and so did other manufacturers. You need to discuss it with your clinic and find out what's available these days. You needn't wait 6 months or something for your next regular appointment - ring up and say you need to discuss meters and, then tell em what I just said and say that you think you'd probably find such a thing really helpful! LOL

Do they even know that you have difficulty with the maths?
 
I have told them but I've only been here since last August. Thank you for the advice, I shall talk to them about that.
 
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