I agree, although I’m using the Loop auto bolus branch. I think either of these would work well for you, @Kaelan.
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I don’t have as much experience with Loop as others here. But one thing that was helpful for me was to make my target range a little bigger.
When it was a small range, like 80-90, Loop was always monkeying with my basal to try to hit that small 10 point range. It was constantly either lowering or raising my basal. This was maddening!
My basal settings are pretty accurate, so I don’t really want a lot of tinkering with it.
When I expanded the target range, to I think 30 or 40 points or something (can’t recall exactly), Loop did not mess with my basal as much. And that turned out to be much better for me.
If this is helpful, apply it. If it is not helpful, ignore it!
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I want to switch to a bolus branch too! But it might take me a few weeks, as I’d like to figure out Loop first.
He has been sleeping a lot more at night since I started Loop!
My dad was looking at that one too. I am not sure which we should go for.
I does that a lot with me too.
That is great, @Eric, thank you very much!
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Second week on Loop
I am still tweaking parameters some. I am trying to suppress lows better. But I am also starting to understand better what my problems are with Loop and what I need to figure out.
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First, what works well: I spent the week doing nothing with Loop. I let it do everything. I did not have a single deep low. If you knew me before, this would represent a incredible change, because I sugar surf all the time, and I do have lows because I often stack on my hormone peaks (and sometimes on others too that I shouldn’t stack on but by the time I know they are not hormone highs it’s too late). So that was great.
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Loop is having a hard time with my hormone peaks, and sometimes takes 6 hours or more to bring me back. I am sticking to the high. I am having a hard time with that. I itch to inject.
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I am having a really hard time with meals, which is weird because meals had disappeared as a problem years ago. The problem is that I always pre-bolus, and I know it is the right thing to do. But while I wait to be in range, Loop suspends me because I go down, and, by the time the carbs show on the curve (they take a while and I am still suspended), I am short insulin. Then I go high, then Loops takes forever to bring me back down and I spend 6 hours high. I hate that Loop is the cause for my high.
My plan for next week:
- I am going to play with my ICR and go higher
- I am going to stop waiting so long to eat, and eat about 15 minutes after I inject.
- I am going to start temp basal overrides when I think I am in a hormone peak. I want to understand @ClaudnDaye’s shortcuts to see if they can do all I want: for instance, start a 50% override for 45 minutes, and set up an alarm for the same duration.
My results for this week:
- 1% lows (it has not happened since I was in honeymoon)
- Time In range (70-180): 84%, a bit better
- TDD 42U, which is lower than my pre-LOOP TDD of 55.
- Carbs per day: about 140, of which none are correction carbs (!)
- calculated A1C is significantly higher: 6.4% from 5.8% when I started. But, as a reminder, I am using a high target range (112-125), on Roger’s advice while I am tuning everything. I think that I probably could lower my target range to 80-115 (wide per @Eric’s advice) and regain 0.5% in A1c, if I don’t start going too low.
Last night, for instance (Loop was down between 12:00am and 2:00am):
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I also want to mention I’m having lots of problems with connectivity, both with Dexcom and with my pod. One common recommendation on the forums is to unlock the phone so as to leave the screen on. Now I do that at night, but I am still having problems. I think it may be due to my iPhone’s lowish storage. I have tried everything to get rid of “other” in iPhone memory (16GB out of 32) but nothing works. I will reset the phone and see if I can resolve this.
So, @Chris, now my dad does not stay up to give me sugar or insulin, but to restart my phone 2-3 times a night. Btw, not being able to free my iphone’s cache memory (“other”) drives him crazy: he calls it fascist software…
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Exercise
I run cross country 45-60 minutes per day, 5-6 days per week.
I can’t give a good account of what’s going on yet. A couple of weeks before I started Loop, I stopped dropping while running: I don’t know why. I now often go up a bit to start with, then drop very, very slowly. I used to go to 80% basal 30 minutes before running, but now I keep my regular basal. I have to figure out what is going on. Loop changing my basal while I am running would be a pain, so I need to figure it all out. If I need to I’ll go open loop when I run.
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This graph looks amazing! You are doing a great job tweaking parameters.
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I don’t know what model of iPhone you’re using, but the new replacement for the SE is (comparatively) affordable and works much better than the old ones for Loop.
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Your dad is never one to pull punches. LOL 
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It is just the additional speed and memory, or do you see other things that make it a better Loop machine?
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Interesting !! I recently started tandem X2 Control-IQ, and having similar basal suspensions. My solution is a extended meal bolus (dual), so still delivers insulin when basal drops or suspends.
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I’m not sure – it just feels zippier and boluses seem to spend less time in the “thinking” mode before they go through. To be fair the last phones we were using (iPhone 6s) were hand-me downs that had endured God-knows-what in the hands of various people who spend their lives rock climbing.
So it’s possible the 6s that we used were just crummy.
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Do you see less connectivity issues or Loop stoppages? I am curious, as K is seeing a lot of that.
So, that improved for us when we tried using a new RileyLink. Is your RileyLink old?
At the time we were reacting on instinct because we had no time to think at all. Afterwards, when we talked about it, we all thought we had made a lot of bad decisions.
Later in the trip, my dad was not stopping at red lights any more whenever he thought the neighborhood was sketchy, he would just drive through. A week and a half later, we were in an area where we had been told we should not stop (too dangerous), and we got a flat, but we kept on driving until we found a fenced area, and we drove into it to change the tire: my dad convinced the guard to let us in with some cash.
I guess I was! I fought to keep my D gear and my computer, and I did. In the end, we lost very little, just my Mom’s purse (the strap broke in the fight) and a small backpack with little in it.
But we still lost quite a few days, because we missed a flight and we had to stay in Capetown for several days instead of flying to Kruger Park right then. It was probably better though, because my hands got infected from the injuries in the fight, and this way we were able to see a doctor and get antibiotics and other medicine. In Kruger Park it would have been harder: when we got there later, we were far from everything. It was great, actually!
One thing this allowed us to do is that I did get to see the Cape of Good Hope while we were in Capetown waiting for our new flight. That was quite something: the end of the African continent. Well, there I learned that it actually isnt quite it: Cape Agulhas, about 100 miles east, is the real thing. But when you are at the Cape of Good Hope, it really feels like the end of the world! There is a great restaurant in the middle of nowhere really close to that cape called the Two Oceans, but that name is also a big lie, of course.
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These last 3 days have not been so good: during the day I am high a lot. But I think it is because I am getting sick: I am suddenly very insulin resistant, and had to change my pod several hours early because I ran out of insulin.
It is brand new. But, yesterday, I finally reset my phone (it took quite a while to work it through, since you have to back it up on iCloud first), and the past 36 hours I have had a lot fewer drops. Resetting the phone and restoring from backup gave me back 15GB of storage space.
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thank you for sharing!!! I am starting omni loop w/riley link within a few weeks, we have three type 1 diabetics in our house. daughter, 15 will also be looping, but not until I am the guinea pig and get used to it so I can educate her. 17 year old wants to stay on tslim/g6 dex which is fine, lol he can use the stockpiled supplies. so excited to start looping! daughter also super excited, you would think it was christmas lol
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I have had a hard time updating my progress on Loop: sorry it took me so long. Here is an update of what happened with me on Loop since the last time.
School started August 17. I was wondering how well the transition would happen. My insulin needs normally go up a lot during the school day: at breakfast, I normally inject 3U extra and up my basal by 30% for the next 6 hours. I was not quite sure what would happen with Loop.
The change was very difficult to figure out. My TDD went from 40-45 during summer to 65+ in the first 6 weeks of school. I did not know how to deal with Loop.
My first strategy, for the first few weeks, was to do nothing: I was hoping that Loop would simply deal with my peaks and bring me back down. My BG went crazy: Loop would leave me stranded above 200 for 6-8 hours or more. Even at night, I would not come back from an evening peak for many many hours. My calculated A1C went up close to 7 for a few weeks. The only good part was that my lows were practically 0%. I was super stressed: I felt I was spending way too long too high. But also, when I am high, I can’t focus and work, so it was really hard to keep my grades up.
After the first few days, I started to inject insulin every time I saw Loop recommend more insulin (if you don’t, Loop will simply dispense it over a period of time). The slightly faster injections made no difference at all.
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By late August, it was clear that Loop could not deal with my peaks. By then, I had noticed that my TDD had increased a lot. I took my basal, ISF and ICR up a lot but not quite in proportion, over a week. There was a slight improvement, but Loop was still quite unable to bring me down from high hormonal peaks.
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My next attempt was to increase my basal through overrides. Over the next two weeks, I played around with different percentages by which I should increase my basal when peaking. I started in small quantities, with 20% and 30%. But the changes seemed to make no difference, really.
After plenty of experimentation, I progressively increased my overrides. I ended up settling for 30%, 50%, and 80%. I upped by 30% when I was around 150, by 50% when I hit 180, and by 80% when I passed 250 (or fast on the way). I generally set them up for 1 hour 30, and set an alarm for the same time, so that I could decide what to do.
The overrides make some impact: mostly,they allowed Loop to decide to add more insulin sooner than before, after figuring out that I was not coming down. But Loop was still unable to bring me down when I was in the big hormone peak. So I was still spending a lot of time super high, with a crappy calculated A1C (around 6.6-6.7), and often unable to work well. What was really positive, though, was that my lows were practically nonexistent.
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