Mum

[Janicehorgan]

Hi, I’m a mum of a son who has type one diabetes with sight loss and a partial amputation, he is currently waiting to have a closed loop pump fitted ? Can anyone give me comfort and reassurance that this will give Paul a better way of controlling his condition..many thanks Janice

 

[Sally71]

It may do, it isn’t just plug and play though, it does require quite a lot of effort.
Advantages include:
Much more precise dosing
Instead of long-acting insulin, the pump delivers tiny doses of rapid-acting every few minutes, with the result that you can vary the amount by the hour and tailor it exactly to what your body needs, instead of one injection a day which works when it works
The ability to increase or decrease the whole lot by a percentage easily, to help you deal with things like illness or exercise
HCL pumps link to a sensor (either Libre or Dexcom), so have a constant readout of your blood sugar and will vary the background dose accordingly. E.g. if they detect your blood sugar going up they will increase the background amount and/or do a correction dose, if you are dropping they will reduce the basal or stop it all together until you start to come up again. So you should remain more stable overall. At the moment you still have to manually input carbs when you are eating though

Disadvantages
Having to be attached to it all the time, although most people say after a few days they barely notice that it’s there
It can take a lot of work and fiddling to get it set up optimally for you, and diabetes being what it is the settings will almost certainly need to be changed from time to time
Doesn’t completely prevent hypos or hypers, although should make them less common and easier to deal with when they do happen, if you’ve got it set up correctly
Higher risk of DKA; if the pump fails you have no insulin at all and blood sugars will rise very quickly. So you need to keep pens as emergency back up
Can be hard in the beginning, you have to learn a whole new way of thinking. It does get easier when you get used to it though.

How much it will benefit your son really depends on what his problems are, my daughter has one and we love it but they don’t suit everyone, and you still have to be prepared to put some work in. Make sure you or he asks lots of questions and fully understand how it works. Hope it goes well for you 🙂

 

[Janicehorgan]

Thank you so much for your reply x

 

[Inka]

Welcome @Janicehorgan 🙂 Do you know which closed loop your son is getting? There are people here who use various loops so if you knew which his would be, you could hear others’ experience of that same loop.

Does he already use a pump?

 

[Flower]

Hello & welcome @Janicehorgan

I’m partially sighted & use a hybrid closed loop pump HCL. I do have some challenges in seeing enough detail sometimes eg filling the insulin reservoir, priming the tubing but use a large magnifier on a stand and can see detail more clearly through that. It will depend on which pump he’s getting, the training will show him ways to do all the maintenance stuff we need to do eg cannula change every 2/3 days & cgm change every 7-14 days depending on make.

Depending on his level of sight things I’d look out for are ease of filling the insulin reservoir - if there’s a pump using pre filled cartridges, ease of cannula and cgm sensor insertion. Contrast levels of text on the pump screen or if the pump is operated via a mobile phone app where there are more contrast/ text size options.

The results he gets will depend on how he uses the pump & data from the cgm, accuracy of carb counting, working out carb ratios, correction factors, reacting to alarms etc. For me I’ve got much better glucose management with my HCL pump & feel safer & better than I did before.

A closed loop system will help by increasing insulin if levels are creeping up & reducing/stopping insulin if heading hypo but you need to be vigilant about lots of factors eg cannula sites, battery level, insulin reservoir level, cgm accuracy. The effort is worth it to get better glucose stability. It will give him many more options to manage his glucose with different patterns of bolus delivery and background insulin profiles.

I hope things go well for him, at the start it can all seem quite daunting but after getting used to the new system I hope he starts to see improvements. Best Wishes.

 

[everydayupsanddowns]

Welcome to the forum @Janicehorgan

Sorry to hear about your son’s sight loss and amputation

Diabetes can be a real swine can’t it.

Great news that he is in line for a hybrid closed loop insulin pump. We have members ‘looping’ on most of the available systemsI think, so do let us know which box of tricks he is getting, and hopefully someone will be able to share their experiences.

In general hybrid closed loops help to even out some of the wobbles of day-to-day life with T1. They do still need careful handling, and work best when they are being fed the right information (eg carb counts of meals, and dosing at the right time with enough prebolus time to allow the insulin time to get going), but research shows they can offer increased stability, and improved “time in range”.

Hope he gets on well with it. Has he been on an insulin pump before?