New Insulin Pump!

The month of May wasn't all doom and gloom: I got a new insulin pump!  

My VEO, which is over five years old now, had a crack in the casing. :(  And after trialing (and hating) the Medtronic 630G five years ago, I wasn't really keen on trying a new Medtronic pump.  But my nurse had the perfect solution: trial the new Tandem pump!

So at the beginning of the month, my nurse set me up with a trial pump.  She was so awesome about the whole thing too - she told me that if I hated it, just rip it off and go back to my VEO whenever I wanted.  What was really awesome about the trial too, on top of the pump, was that I was able to trial some new infusion sets too!  I've been using Silhouettes for many, many years (since I got my first pump - my nurse said back then locally they put everyone on Silhouettes) and never even thought to try anything else.  Silhouettes are angled sites with a fairly large needle (I was using 19mm); my nurse set me up with Tru-Steels which had only a 6mm needle!  She also let me try some of the AutoSoft sets (which also had the shorter needle).  I pretty much knew from the first few days that no matter what happened, I would not be going back to the Silhouettes, but that got confirmed when I accidentally knocked out a TruSteel the first time.  The TruSteel have the same attachment as my Silhouettes, so I was able to put one on in a pinch at work.  But it wasn't nearly as nice as the shorter TruSteels!

As to the pump itself, I loved it!  I wasn't sure what I would think about a pump that can do its own thing (its got Control-IQ technology, which makes decisions using Dexcom data to correct your blood sugar when you're high or low), but it didn't bother me at all.  Of course it helped knowing I can keep an eye on things and stop what the pump is doing if I don't agree with it.

The one thing I had some trouble with was the exercise function.  I turned it on a couple of hours before wanting to go on a walk with my mom, but for reasons unknown went low before we'd even started.  So I'll have to work on getting that working properly for me (my nurse suggested making another profile with all the basals cut in half specifically for exercise, so I'll be giving that a try).

I was able to trial the Tandem pump for a month.  Within the first few days I already knew I liked it, but I waited a bit longer just to make sure.  Needless to say, my new pump arrived last week; we plugged it in on Friday. :)

Changing to the Tandem pump makes me think of The Book of Better: Life With Diabetes Can't Be Perfect. Make It Better by Chuck Eichten, which I read several years ago.  In it, Eichten suggested that changing to something that makes your life even just a tiny bit better will have a great impact on your life.  So while I am super grateful for my VEO - it was a good pump that served me well over the last five and a half years - I am excited for this next chapter with Tandem, and the little bit of better it will bring to my life. :)