Wow, morning all!
I'm thrilled by this discussion re the closed loop -- we're up to date with it etc, but it's just so GREAT to see folks who have actually been doing it -- Rose and Randomange! Yay, and well done. We're absolutely CERTAIN, like everyone, that this is the future of t1 diabetes therapy...And it gives us such hope. When I'm at my worst, worrying horribly about E going away to uni and having to deal with all this, I just think well in five years, who knows where we will be? Would certainly have thought smaller more accurate sensors, at the very least.
So anyway. Panics me just to think about it.
Yesterday was a hypo day for E -- we think we've figured out why. But by the end of the day he'd had four. Ugh. This does seem to happen with him unless we really catch it quick: once he's had more than one, he seems on a spiral...
In short: did everything right for PE except was 7.5 half an hour before at break and hadn't eaten anything. He prob should have eaten. Also, he knew he was going hypo at the end of PE and didn't stop cos almost over 😱.
(This hypo was made much worse by the fact that he'd badly skinned his knee in rugby, and then proceeded to whack his head on the fire extinguisher. AND all his friends had gone ahead. AND he was teased. AND of course he was a little muddled and low. My heart broke for him yesterday. He hated it. We are now working out ways to let his classmates -- even those not his friends -- understand what's going on.)
Like a good boy though he put himself on a temp basal for two hours and went to lunch. However all this was not enough to counteract, and he ended up hypo again in maths I think two hours later. (Apparently the teacher is on the VERY dull side, and he was behind anyway with all the testing, and so he's a little confused in top set maths now...This is the first time diabetes has properly interfered with learning, and I'm feeling cross about it! 😡)
By the time he got home he was nearly low again, had 5g of free carb. An hour and a half later, before dinner, he was actually hypo again. (This basal has now been changed, as I thought yesterday would be necessary: 3 out of 4 afternoons he's gone low if not hypo from 4pm onwards...).
For dinner we were scraping the barrel and had pizza with bells on: goats cheese, tomato and asparagus. The bases were cheese and tomato, store bought. None of us could remember what we do for him with pizza, so we dual waved it for 2 hours. Mistake. He hypo-ed again at 2.5 hours, treated, went to bed on 6.6, and woke up on 9.3! Clearly, like with pasta, he rises very late with pizza -- the bedtime reading was taken 4 and half hours after eating. Pizza is worse than pasta with most people. The spike can be anything up to 8 hours later so beware !
We *should* have tested in the night to see if/where he rose, but we are all fighting mild colds, and shattered, so didn't.
Sigh. I wish oh I WISH we could figure out a way to treat these late rises! The problem is, there's the bolus up front, seemingly a complete break with very little extra insulin needed, then a time when insulin is needed, like another three hours after that! Any ideas?! (Obv we can get up in the night and set up temp basal or dw, but good grief!) You could always try a low temp basal but for longer ie temp of say 135% for 5 hours and see what happens.
Am chasing our team today for sensors. These I believe will help us identify the actual timing...?
***
We haven't yet had any alarms etc because we are not on sensors. I'm envious of those on Veos for the shut off facility, and Tracey for her 'louder and louder Roche' . We have two years I believe with the medtronic 722...
One thing that has happened which I completely forgot about until now: DO NOT LET THE BATTERY RUN DOWN! What I mean is, we have decided to change it when it gets to 3/4 empty. Reason: three weeks ago, E went to bed as usual, no alarms or beeps. When I went in to wake him eight hours later, we both heard strange noise...He said 'I think I've been hearing that all night, dreaming about it, it sounds familiar, I'll remember what it is in a minute' (!). Traced it to pump: NO DELIVERY. For the last two hours, we figured out! This has got to be an error and I would phone Medtronic. You should have about 12 hours left when it flashes up low battery. We have gone out for a long day with a low battery warning and if it flashes at school first thing she is fine and we change it when she gets home.
So the battery had gone from no warning to completely empty in six hours. BEWARE! Our previous experience with battery change had been some vibrating alerts for a while before, then we changed. But clearly these alerts do not last long!
(btw: bgs not as bad as you'd think from that experience: put him on 150% temp basal for a couple of hours, and he was only a bit high for half of the day...)
Enjoy your pedicure, Mand!
One day my glucose was too high, and another day it was too low, and the algorithm told them exactly what to do each time. You could watch the predicted line from the algorithm, and what your blood glucose actually did, and they were a perfect match. This was using actual blood tests rather than a sensor, but it gives me confidence that they're heading in the right direction!
