I think that decision really depends on what you are looking for a pump to do. My son really loves his pump, be also uses MDI at least one month a year, and his control isn’t remarkably different.
For us, the ability to tailor the basal is very helpful at controlling our nights and dawn effect. The ability to eat until full, while not having to give multiple shots to cover dinner is really nice, and the ability to skip meals completely or delay meals is good for a chaotic schedule.
On the pump front, the Basal IQ algorithm has been a game changer for us, we used to have to eat carbs to land big drops, and now my son is able to land big drops with his pump doing all the work, so no need to monitor and time carb intake to land the drop. That has reduced how much time he has to think about diabetes which has been nice.
Modern pumps don’t require much tech savviness, in my opinion. Program it and go, basically. If you can use a cellphone or program your coffeemaker, you can set up and use a pump. If you want to get into XDrip or other phone apps or looping, you might need a higher tech comfort level.
But really, if I can do it, anyone can do it. A lot is done in your head anyway. If you’re doing injections, you already know how to modify doses.
That’s the way I remember it too. Was too young to worry what units my lab tested BG’s were in, but the first meters were all mg/dl.
Like everything else in Canada that slowly changed when we went metric (speed limits and weights went metric in '76 or 77). So most (older) Canadians were forced to be “units bi-lingual”
Yeah… just strikes me as weird. Plus they have a perfect conversion ratio of 1:18… so I can’t even begin to understand why they ever diverged. It makes no sense to me.
Then again, we strangely still use imperial measurements in every day conversation for so many things (except in Quebec I think), such as weight and height.
I prefer hundredweight/fluid scruple for my obscure British Imperial blood sugar measurement system.
In this case a blood sugar of 100 mg/dl would convert to 0.00000023 hundredweight/fluid scruple. As you can see this is a much more useful measurement system than anything the metric system has to offer.
How about using a pint for the volume part? That has to be the most commonly available unit of volume measurement in England. Just fill it up with blood and weigh the glucose (somehow).
The Endocrine Society has an app in the play store. When you open the app, click “SI Converter”, scroll to glucose, and type in the value then it will convert it . You can key in either value.
Thank you for the welcome. I have lurked a while. Just got a Libre sensor and reader, has re-sparked my interest in the technology. I’ll do a proper introductory post some time.
