If any of you went to school in the 80s and 90s you may recognise the name of the track on the left – Redhead Kingpin’s Pump it Hottie…. been going around in my head since getting hooked up to the pump yesterday, classic.
Anyway – the whole scenario went superbly yesterday and I’m now a couple of hours shy of my first day as an insulin pumper – alriiiiiight!
Turned up at the hospital and the nurse and I went through all of the pump setup again…. I loaded up the chamber with some humalog and sorted out the cannula and filled the tube and all that sort of stuff. Then we went through and set all the basal rates and insulin to carb ratios and correction ratios which had been worked out by the nurse and the specialist based on their analysis of my testing and results which I provided them with a few weeks ago.
And pretty much just like that, I walked out the door with a little machine attached to my hip which now administers injections on my behalf – crazy!
It’s been pretty good so far actually – and the support I’ve had from the nurse at the hospital has been fantastic. She rang me mid afternoon then also around 9pm to check in on how I was going and to help me with programming decisions, and she’s just called me again this morning to see how I went in the night.
I have been instructed to test every hour on the hour, with 3 hourly tests in the night. I’ve actually got no idea how long I have to do this for – I sort of don’t want to know how long it will be til I get to sleep right through the night again! Last night I did a 1am test and a 4am test then another at 6.15 when I got up.
So, basically the next few days to a week are going to be about testing, testing and refining that basal rate and all the other ratios. I’m not to do any strenuous exercise in this first week just so we can get a good handle on everyday scenarios and fine tune them as much as possible, then work on the outlying situations.
Sleeping with the pump didn’t worry me at all actually – I bought a couple of little waist pump pockets and they magically arrived in the post yesterday, great timing. One of them was a night time one with a fleecy pocket and an elastic waistband, so it was all good.
Anyway – so far I’ve not a bad word to say about the pump, nor the hospital. It has all been grand. More soon.
Posted in General
Tagged as Cozmo, insulin pump
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Aaron wrote
What does it feel like to not have the routine of taking injections though? Isn’t it unsettling?
Nic wrote
To be honest, I don’t find the lack of injections unsettling at all – it’s nice not to have to do them! You have freedom to do them wherever you want (eg if I’m on public transport I’d wait til I got off to do an injection for fear of being bumped), it’s less of an eye opener for people and also the pump records when you injected and how much, so you never end up in that situation of ‘hang on, I’m really not sure if I took my injection just then or not”.