By no means am I an expert on this diabetes thing. I have a grasp of the basics: food makes my blood sugar goes up, insulin down, exercise helps, these are the facts, yet this sentence is a lie. But I’ve found that almost everything I thought I knew, took for granted, or even assumed about my diabetes management prior to starting on an insulin pump is a distant memory spent counting insulin pen needles. It’s not that everything I knew doesn’t translate to pumping insulin, it’s just that everything I knew on multiple daily injections doesn’t translate to pumping insulin.

Basic things like movement require an entirely new perspective now that I’m negotiating pump tubing, and the pump itself.

Bouts of high blood glucose levels don’t leave with any expediency, they kick down the door and crash on my sofa for an unreasonable amount of time.

Image (linked) via giphy.com

Now that I have the ability to program correction factors and basal rates for various times of the day, it’s not enough to just take 2 units of Humalog before bed if I’m above 160 mg/dL. There’s genuine math behind everything, and if I’m going to get this right, I have to understand this math. Ironically, I feel like I have to pay even more attention to my diabetes after this change my diabetes management to a device that often enables ‘letting go’ more regularly. Programming a mealtime bolus and more-or-less forgetting about my diabetes after insulin starts flowing is great, but the minutes before that bolus are much more thoughtful and intense, because getting this right requires a lot more effort than before.

Figuring out how my diabetes works with this insulin pump is learning to walk all over again. The basic concepts may still apply, but it’s going to take time before I feel comfortable simply putting one foot in front of the other.

(For what it’s worth, I wanted to go with a kool-aid main gif, but the only one that would have worked was of a rather poor quality.)