What a whirlwind that last 2 weeks has been for our family!
Cadence began pumping on her Animas 2020 on March 31. We started on one basal pattern and then went from there. There's been alot of tweaking with her Insulin to Carb ratio (how many carbs 1 unit of insulin will cover), her Insulin Sensitivity Factor (of which I have no idea how they calculate), and of course the basal rates (how much background insulin she gets during periods of the day).
Four days into the pump start we started getting some highs, it turns out that Cadence picked that week to get a cold and pinkeye. Fun...not. So we rode the high sugar express for the next 5 days, threw out any hope of dialing in our pump settings for that period in time and just wiped the nose and soothed the cries. It was like real parenting!
After the illness was over we are back to the adjustment of no needles. That being said we still have to put in Cadence's infusion sets every three days. An infusion set (in our case) is a spring loaded needle device that puts a flexible plastic tube under cadence's skin with a port/interface above the skin which we attach her pump tubing. It's pretty slick and easy but there is more involved with it than a regular injection. Numbing the site, priming the pump, mixing new insulin, etc. etc.
We've worked out a few kinks in the system as well. We had an infusion set go bad on us one night and Cadence's blood sugar shot up into the 20's (VERY high), so I had to give her a needle at 3am one night to bring her sugar down. So, the no-needle streak lasted 6 days, but was also the last one I've given since.
One of the hardest adjustments to the pump thing is where we put it. We bought a bunch of tank tops from Pumpwear, which are simply a little pocket on the shirt to hold the pump. That covers the daytime hours, the night time is the weird one. We can't figure out exactly how we want to have the pump on Cadence at night, leave it loose? Drop it down one of the legs of her pajamas? Pump pack? We're trying everything out, One night Nic went to pick her up out of her crib and the pump was wrapped around one of the bars and "rip", out came the infusion site (ouch). Cadence was unimpressed and irritated by that. Luckily, on a tip from another diabetic, we left the old site in for a few hours "just in case", no we reconnected and changed the site again in the morning. GREAT tip there.
Overall we are loving the pump and Cadence's control seems to be better. Lots of tweaking to be done still but as I've said before, I can't believe we waited this long to go this way.
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