Insulin pump update

It has finally happened, after so many, many months and discussions, blood tests, finger pricks and jumping through (figurative!) hoops.  I am hooked up to an insulin pump.  The Accuchek combo insulin spirit  
 ( http://www.accu-chek.co.uk/gb/products/insulinpumps/combo.html )
to be precise.  I chose this particular one from a place of absolutely no idea what any of the pumps where like, their pros or cons.  They were spread out before and I had to pick one, just like that.  The reason I picked this one is that it has a remote control (which is also the blood glucose meter) , so I reasoned that out in public I would be able to give myself meal bolus's unobtrusively.  So basically, I am no longer on a long acting insulin to provide me with a 24 hour background of insulin always in my body, and a quick acting insulin given whenever I eat, based on the amount of carbohydrate I am eating.  I am now drip fed the quick acting insulin 24 hours a day, and use extra units (bolus) of the same insulin to cover any carbohydrates consumed.  The drip feed (called the basal rate) can be adjusted for every hour of the day, once you work out how much your body needs at a particular time.  For example we have already established that my insulin requirements are lower in the morning and higher through the night.  So I have a basal rate of 0.3 units for each hour between 8am and 1pm, a rate of 0.4 units from 1pm to 11pm and then 0.5 units from 11pm to 8am.  And this can be adjusted to be a different rate for each hour if you need it!!  It is this that makes it able to mimic a pancreas much more closely.

To be honest it didn't start too well on Monday when I was first hooked up!   My diabetic nurse Karen Jones is great - she is not too serious and not too reverential, which lightens the mood a lot, but I also never get a sense that she doesn't know what she is talking about.  She told me that when she did her pump training she had to wear a pump in the same way a diabetic does (with saline solution), for 24 hours, so she does know what I mean when I talk about the practical side of it and can empathise honestly.  It was a complicated process getting it all set up and when the pump was programmed and I had inserted the cannula, loaded up the insulin cartridge and primed the infusion set, I did feel a very strange sensation wash over me.  I did that out of body thing where I felt like I was outside myself watching myself.  I did feel very emotional and also a sense despair.  Like, okay, this is it, this is my life now, forever 24 hours a day.  I wanted to cry.

Anyway I came home with a a ton of reading material about how everything worked and what to do in a hundred different scenarios... and needed to scrabble through it all within a few hours of being home, as a result of the pump beginning to beep incessantly and flash "occlusion alarm" alarm at me.   So there I was, ankle deep in paper trying to figure out what I had to do to make it work again, while trying not to panic!  I finally worked out what I had to do,  and did it.  Relief. Anyway the crux of the matter was, although it appeared to be working (ie, no alarms, the insulin was being pumped out) it gradually became apparent that it wasn't.  By Tuesday afternoon I was running the highest sugar levels I have ever had.  I was really rather unwell, and realised as I lay sobbing on the stairs that I was no longer able to look after Tom.  I rang my wonderful friend Karen who came and collected Tom and then fetched Sam from school and kept both kids until after tea.  Steve came home and looked after me and my nurse told me to disconnect the pump and revert to my insulin pens until the next day.  When I went in to see my diabetic nurse the next day we were unable to figure out what had gone wrong, the pump was clearly pushing the insulin out and there was nowhere else it could have gone except under the skin.  And yet, my body was behaving as if it had no insulin in it.  So we just started again from scratch, with my back up pump... and since then things have been, well, okay. I have to move the cannula site every 2 - 3 days to ensure the health of the tissue, and full the insulin reservoir at the same time, which is a bit of a faff, but nowhere near as much as having to inject 5 times a day.  It is a slow process as we work out what my basal rate is, but I have got the feeling that this is actually going to work. 

My despair has not gone away exactly, but I do have a creeping hope that this will change my life.