Like others said, you can still do the same manual bolus, it will just no longer do the auto-bolus feature while in sleep mode.
I definitely bolus for meals. Nothing really different on this front.
Having said that, I have forgotten to bolus MANY times, and by the time I remember, I can see that my IOB has gone up because CIQ has already been adjusting my basals to try and control the rise in BGs.
And where it truly shines is that we know that every day is different, and we lack a way to manually compensate for every little thing.
CIQ isn’t a full Loop setup, but commercially speaking, it is the best we have at this time.
This allows us to offload a lot of brain drain associated with keeping our BGs in a pretty tight margin that we set ourselves to feel safe, comfortable and able to attain.
This approach has greatly lessened my personal time spent and increased my Time in Range. So, my quality of life has increased significantly.
I posted many posts in another forum that I don’t visit any more about how I personally went about making adjustments for me.
Basics were:
sleep mode.
Raise Basal rates, and reduce to fewer different rates (I have 4 now, compared to 7-9 before.)
Change your correction factor to be more aggressive. Be cautious, make small changes on this one!
Change carb ratio to be more aggressive. Again, be cautious. This is not as big a factor as correction factor, but it still plays into giving a slightly larger bolus up front, then letting CIQ adjust/decrease basals later to bring you down smoothly.
Not sure how much they affect everything overall, but I know I set my weight and TDD to max settings so that CIQ could make adjustments with less limitations.
My current BG/a1c according to my Dexcom is 113/5.5 which is a surprise to me, considering at the end of may it was 6.5
I hope this is accurate, as I have been continuing to eat very low-carb. However, with my morning lows that I have been contiuously trying to correct being a part of that register I will wait and see if that number changes.
Chasing lows is a real drag. Tandem ControlIQ has definitely helped with both overnight lows and highs.
While my Dexcom GMI is higher(6.3) my A1C is still in the 5s. I attribute that to not chasing the perfect BG and overall more stability in my numbers. Then again, I could be full of ■■■■…lol.
The easiest way to get a 5.5 A1C is to spend all night with BG below 65. But that’s not healthy or safe. I’d rather avoid the lows and accept a higher A1C. Early on, I got the opinion that 6.0 was the point of severely diminishing returns. At that point, BG is no longer a meaningful risk factor for poor health outcomes, and further health gains would have to come from other things like exercise, quality of diet, body weight and composition, blood pressure, lipids, quality of sleep,…
My endos at the Joslin Clinic recommend (for me) erring on the high side rather than the low side - given the choice between running low and running high, they recommend running high.
As we all know, T1 diabetes is such an individual disease, so this may not apply to everyone, but that’s the strategy I’ve been using. (even so, i still go low maybe once or twice a week).