After I left training for my new pump, I was back on my own and back to the pumping life. As soon as I got in the car it felt so different again having that pump in my pocket and having to buckle my seatbelt without pinching the tubing while doing so. I haven’t had to do this in almost a year.
Once I drove home, it was approaching dinner time and I knew that I was going to be cooking chicken breasts with steamed green beans. As I set the steamer, which takes about 25-30 minutes, the alerts started. One set of vibrates, then another set of vibrates, and then again and again. There were several “Low Predicted” alerts that started going off. I loved the fact that this alert was going off because when I am cooking, I am usually sweating and concentrating on cooking the food and not paying so much attention to the quickly dropping blood sugar. I took some time to test after a few of the alerts and the meter test confirmed that I was not just going low, but was in that low state. Little cup of juice while I waited for dinner to finish was all I needed.
And there’s another. I do like the warning though. So many notes for my first 24 hours of #530G pic.twitter.com/raqYY5m0Uw
— Chris Stocker (@LifeofaDiabetic) April 30, 2014
Later that night was #DSMA and I finally had some free time to participate for the first time in a really long time and I loved the topic of getting to know you. I always want to know more about people other than just the fact that they have diabetes, it’s not the only thing about you, so it would be nice to know more.
Several times during DSMA, I did receive a No Delivery when trying to deliver a few correction boluses. I was in the middle of things, so I just re-tried the bolus thinking maybe it was just a hiccup. Received the message again, so then I did a rewind and tube priming, still received the No Delivery. Since that didn’t work, I figured that maybe it was the tubing, so I grabbed another tubing and primed that one as well, same result, No Delivery. I kind of figured that it was a bad site, but before I just change out the site, I try to troubleshoot it with other options other than losing an infusion set.
Unfortunately, it was a bad site and when I pulled it out, there was blood. There wasn’t a lot because I was prepared for blood to come out and put pressure on right away. After that, it was delivering perfectly fine and my blood sugar began to come back down to normal.
In fact, it started to come down too much come morning time. I woke up around 6 a.m. and I saw that the CGM was reading 72, and I had the threshold suspend set at 70. That meant, that it was going to go off soon and I hadn’t really explained the really loud noise of the Threshold suspend to Amanda yet, so she was going to get freaked out. In order to avoid this, I changed the settings to 60 instead of 70. I then tested with a meter and the CGM read 72, and the meter was 105. I was not very happy with that large difference in reading. I know they will never be the same, and we are to look at the trends of the CGM and not the number, but my BG was actually rising at the time, not falling.
Once again, little OJ and we were good to go.
It was now my first day working again wearing the pump and CGM full time, so I was obsessively checking my BG (I tend to do that the day of and after an endo appt!)
There were not many alerts throughout the day. A few highs, a few low predicted, and one that made me happy because the meter check re-assured me that the CGM was doing it’s job.
Now that’s more like it. Low Predicted alert and confirmed with a bg check. #530g pic.twitter.com/MmpkKcXnN3
— Chris Stocker (@LifeofaDiabetic) May 1, 2014
For dinner, I was really going to put the pump and infusion set site to the test with a meal at Pei Wei, which is about 200g carb in just one plate. This was going to be close to about 2 max boluses. I took a max bolus and then 10 minutes later did a max square bolus with 65% now and 35% 30 minutes later. It worked….a little. There was a high blood sugar later, but nothing the pump could have done any better.
All in all, the first day with the 530G was not bad. It will take a while for me to work out my basal rates again, but I will get there. Wednesday night will be a full week with the system, so I’ll be doing a weekly CareLink report as well.