Happy New Year to all our customers and their families. May 2023 be good to you and allow you to thrive and prosper.
The end of 2022 has been a blur for me personally with so much happening and one big change that arrived at the very end of the year, in the form of a fancy, new, closed loop, insulin pump.
The dream - a pump that can finally take the pressure off the 24/7 job of being a pancreas for my son. I quickly relinquished my pancreatic responsibilities and handed over to the technology. It all started so well and we really felt like we had this all figured out, after all, we were not newbies anymore and had pump experience.
Boxing Day 2022 was spent with a few more surprises than we expected as ketones of 2.3 quickly built up, and it became clear the pump was not giving any insulin. Two set changes later, we had been unlucky with the cannula right? All sorted and behind us, except the cannula failed again and then again! Ketones back up, pen insulin to bring them back down and whole load of stress and tears.
It turned out we just could not get on well with a particular type of cannula and, since swapping to a different one, all is working as it should. They call it ‘teething problems’, don’t they? I don’t remember teething being so painful! We are over the hump now of the learning curve thankfully and our reward is finally sleeping, which despite all our past efforts, we simply could not master with a regular pump.
All hail the mighty closed loop. It really is making a huge difference to our well-being and the dark circles under my eyes, as we are no longer at the constant mercy to early hours low blood sugars. I haven’t entirely left the club, but I am getting much needed respite. It’s funny how you don’t really appreciate how much sleep you need until you can’t actually get all you need. My son too was also clearly sleep deprived as he slept for twelve hours solid the first few nights of the tech working properly. He never sleeps like that!
We are so blessed to be able to access this technology and experience the life changing benefits of it. It is my hope that all people with Type 1 will be able to access this technology until the cure is found. I think about how far tech has come in the treatment of Type 1 and the medical advances in understanding autoimmune diseases and I remain positive.
