Periods.... HELP!

[G3m]

Hi there,

I posted over a year ago about help in deciding whether to make the big decision and get a pump. I have now been on a pump for 20 months and love being on it.

However, I am now having issues with my periods for the fact that every month mid cycle my blood sugars go high and once I have come on my blood sugars go through the floor to the point of not being able to feel that I am having a hypo.

I just wanted a bit of advice of what I can do to control this situation and any helpful tips.

Thanks, G3m.

 

[Sally71]

You could set different basal patterns for different times of the month. My daughter's pump will allow up to 5 different preset basal patterns; we have 2 different ones set, one for school days and one for weekends/holidays (because she needs quite a lot less insulin when at school). The only snag is that you have to switch between them manually, no way to tell the pump to change over automatically on a certain day!

You could experiment with temporary basals for a while if you're not sure what level to set the second one at; these shift the whole basal pattern up or down by a percentage and will run for max 24 hours. This helped me when I wanted to set up my daughter's second one, we were using temp basals every day until I found the level that worked and then from that I could work out how to set up the second permanent one. Since then they've both been tweaked quite a lot of course!

Which pump have you got? It shouldn't be too hard to set up a new basal pattern, be prepared for some trial and error to get it right though, good luck 🙂

 

[G3m]

Thank you for replying to me on this query as well!!

I have got the Accu Check Combo pump. I will try and set up a new basal pattern and see if this helps.

Thanks again

G3m

 

[trophywench]

Easy to do on the Combo - just tedious as you have to make 24 separate entries even when it's exactly to same for several hours at certain times of a day! They've corrected that on the Insight - as I've just programmed Basal Pattern 2 on mine and since I was doing it without the instructions (I think I might be turning into a bloke, help!!) it took me a while to realise you can actually enter the physical amount of hours you want it for (actually you can do it in 15 minute slots - do we think that might be a bit OTT?) but we got there, in the end! LOL

 

[Sally71]

If several hours are the same I think there's a way that you can copy it down from one hour to the next; I can't remember how though lol!

The Roche rep tried to tell me to get the config software, then you can copy basal 1 into basal 2 and just tweak it from there. Blow that, thought I, that means I've got to ring them to order said software, wait for it to arrive, install it on my PC, work out how to use it etc which will take at least a week. It only took me about 15 mins the "long-winded"way! (I'd already worked out all the numbers)