Hi Splats
We love our pump and would never go back to MDI! Mainly because of the greater flexibility and fine tuning possibilities it gives you that you just could not do with pens!
Pros:
Only one needle every 2 or 3 days instead of several a day. Once cannula is in you can have as many snacks and do as many corrections as you like, don't need a needle each time
Instead of one or two jabs per day of long acting (basal) insulin, the pump carries short acting only and slowly drip feeds you with teeny tiny doses every few minutes. This is called the basal rate and can be adjusted by the hour to your exact requirements, so you get more insulin when you need it and less when you don't. Which should result in more stable BGs. You can't do that with Lantus and Levemir!
With meal boluses you have several options: Standard, which zaps the whole dose in at once the same as a pen, Extended, which drips the dose in slowly over whatever time period you specify (anything from 15 mins to 12 hours on the Roche one) or Multiwave which is a combination of the previous two, i.e. it zaps a portion of the dose in straight away and the rest goes in slowly over a period of time. You get to choose how much up front and how long the rest will take. This is useful for dealing with foods which digest very slowly, and you may also find them handy for other things, although it takes a fair bit of experimentation to find out what works for you!
You can also do temporary basal rates which will increase or decrease your basal rate by a % for a period of time, useful for dealing with illness (usually more required) and exercise (usually less required).
You can also set several permanent basal patterns if you like, e.g. If you work shifts. We have one for school days and another for holidays as activity levels tend to be much higher at school.
Basically all of this fine tuning means that you can have much tighter control over your BGs and with the cannula in all the time you can basically eat what you like when you like, just bolus as and when you need to, 10 times a day if you like!
Cons:
You have to wear it all the time, although I think most people get used to it fairly quickly.
It can take a VERY long time and lots of hard work to get basal rates, ratios etc set up to exactly what works for you, I think it's quite common for new pumpers to go through a phase of wanting to chuck it out of the window!
And then D being D never stays the same for long so you just get everything set up nicely, it all runs smoothly for a week or two and then it all changes and you have to start tweaking everything again, sometimes it seems to be endless! And you still get those mad days when it all goes wrong and you can't work out why, no pump can prevent that.
Occasionally you can have cannula failures etc which are a bit of a faff, especially if you are out and about. You have to test more often just to check that everything is working, the pump should alarm to tell you if something is wrong but there are some things which it cannot detect. If it stops working or if cannula site goes off, you have no long acting insulin on board and therefore BGs can rise rapidly and then DKA beckons if you don't notice it soon enough!
The Animas Vibe is the only completely waterproof pump, if you have any of the others you have to take them off for things like swimming, you are then on a time limit of an hour before it has to go back on again. Don't have to worry about that with jabs! (although you could cheat, plug pump back in temporarily after an hour, do a test, do a correction if high, then take pump off again for another hour)
I have to say, on balance I think the pros far outweigh the cons!
The Roche Combo comes with blood test kit which acts a as remote control for the pump, so that you don't have to fish the pump itself out from under your clothes every time you want to do a bolus. Just test, enter carbs, handset will work out how many units required for carbs + correction if necessary, the it's two more button pushes to deliver bolus and the only time you need to touch the pump itself is when you refill it. We've got that one and it's fab! Downside is that it won't fully integrate with a CGM. I've never yet tried a CGM though so can't comment on that.
Can't think of anything else to add at the moment, hope that helps 🙂
