Changing One of My Pump's Insulin Sensitivity Factors

Every time I need to change one of my pump's insulin sensitivity factors, I seem to have a really hard time understanding what the heck is going on. This happened the last time I had to change one, too. I spent hours trying to understand the numbers and how to change them, reading articles online and going over the chapter in Pumping Insulin. And today I think I figured out why I have such a hard time: most of the advice I find is talking in mg/dl, while I know (and think in) mmol/L!

This is even true of Pumping Insulin. Overall the book is pretty good about giving you the equivalent mmol/L in the text. But the table that talks about changing your correction factor (Table 12.7) is completely in mg/dl.

I made this discovery when I stumbled on a pdf from Medtronic that talked about setting the Bolus Wizard. The pdf showed me how to make an initial insulin sensitivity factor (ISF) calculation with mmol/L using the "100 rule" (insulin sensitivity = 100/daily total = mmol/L / unit of insulin). Plugging in a few of my numbers gave me the aha moment I needed - suddenly I was dealing with numbers I understood.

So with that knowledge in hand, I looked up the conversion for mg/dl to mmol/L and set about converting all of Table 12.7 in Pumping Insulin. So now I'll be totally ready to go the next time I need to make an ISF change!

And in case you're wondering, you convert between mmol/L and mg/dl using 18. (mmol/L × 18 = mg/dl; mg/dl / 18 = mmol/L).