Perhaps that’s why my humalog is being held up. I will try to call Optum today or tomorrow just to stay abreast of the situation, and I shall call my Endo office as well to see about the Lyumjev.
Great! Since you have a CGM you should be able to get an idea of what a good ratio for a split is. That is crazy you can’t get fast-acting insulin. Insurance companies can be so ridiculous! Good luck!
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Ty! Fingers crossed it gets worked out sooner than later.
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Actually, it’s cheaper to buy Lyumjev without insurance. It cost me $35 for a month’s prescription with their discount.
Fiasp is the other one, but if they are not covering Novolog, they won’t cover Fiasp.
Fiasp has a deal as well for people who pay cash. $99 for a month’s prescription.
As you can see, their cash deals are CHEAPER then most people’s insurance co-pays are.
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@Necroplasm I’m relatively new (8 months) to all this, but I seem to recall that Lantus dosing takes a couple of days to “acclimatize” or “level out” to a new dosing regimen. Perhaps some of the longer term folks here can confirm or correct me. If so, you may need to adjust your dosage and stick to it a few days to see if it’s really working out.
Also, at least a few of us having issues with Lantus and lows have chosen to split our dose, part at night, part in the morning. My endo prescribed 11 units at night, but I was constantly having issues with night-time lows; I tried splitting the dose, 6 in the morning, 5 at night, and the frequent nighttime lows have stopped. Some folks say the splitting may require a bit more Lantus, but I haven’t found that’s needed…yet anyway.
As always, you should discuss with your Endo/doc and listen to the advice and rationale. It’s a team effort, but we are the central players.
Tom
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The deal for Fiasp also applies to any of the Novo Nordisk company’s insulin products, like NovoLog, Levemir, etc.
The deal is $99 for a month’s prescription, up to 3 vials per month.
So if your script is for one vial, that one vial is going to cost you $99. If your prescription is for 3 vials, those 3 vials are going to cost you… $99.
So get a script for 3 vials per month of course!
Here is info on it:
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I’ve re discovered “Smarties”! Holy Moly it takes me back to my trick or treating years:-).
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I’ve inadvertently started a thread about Halloween candy. 
I needed the giggle, ty. My humalog has finally been shipped. Perhaps with bolusing I can lower my basal and hope to avoid middle of the night lows and repeating alarms. Stay tuned!
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Yes, of course. When you have both basal and bolus insulin available, the first step is to get the basal right, where “right” means that your BG tends to stay level when nothing’s happening. A BG that tends to drift lower all by itself (especially overnight) suggests reducing the basal little by little until the BG stays pretty level. Then it’s time to figure out your correction ratio, i.e., if you take 1u insulin, how far does your BG drop after a couple hours? This is so that, if your BG is too high, you have a way to figure out how much insulin to take. It’s an easy experiment to run, but of course it depends on the basal being right so that the BG isn’t rising or falling all by itself. And it only works cleanly if “nothing else” is happening to move your BG around—such as eating, or a meal bolus still active, or illness, stress, or hormones. The third thing to explore is the insulin:carb ratio. When eating 10g carb, how much bolus insulin should you take so that the BG comes back down to a reasonable level (like where it was before eating) after a few hours. If the BG usually ends up hanging too high after a meal, that suggests more bolus insulin was needed. There are lots of advanced techniques about meal boluses to learn later, but these are the basics.
Probably your medical staff will suggest starting values for the correction ratio and insulin:carb ratio, and ask you to give them CGM results so they can make changes until they get the numbers dialed in. It likely is reasonable and safe to let them do this for you, but eventually you probably will make your own adjustments.
In my case, I decided that it’s my body, and so I’m actually at liberty to dial in the numbers myself, and I did so right from the beginning. To be safe while doing this (a) I always had glucose available and watched the CGM so that I could rescue myself from an unfolding insulin overdose before I actually got into trouble, and (b) I made one small adjustment at a time and watched for at least 2 days to see if I needed to adjust further or go back.
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It’s a life or death decision you need to act on. I don’t understand why anyone the loves you could be annoyed and not concerned.
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I’m definitely going to speak with my doctor about this at my follow-up, and see if I can get any decent advice from my PCP this morning at my appointment as my bolus insulin should be arriving today at some point. I also have an appointment at the end of July with a nutritionist, so I believe I am on the right path to getting rid of these dangerous hypos.
Thank you so much for all of the knowledge, I will bear all of this in mind and I will pick up some life saving glucose tablets today - being a T1 with both bolus and basal insulins, it’s definitely a smart play to have them on deck to avoid a dire emergency.
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In his defense I was sleeping through all of the urgent low alerts… Which upon examining were at max volume and he woke up like 50 times.
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This is wonderful advice, however I have the dreaded mail order pharmacy system and all of my supplies come at 3 months each. So it is definitely cheaper the way I’m doing it. But if I ever find myself in a pinch with my insurance this is a lovely suggestion!
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There are lots of different kinds. Many of them taste horrible; designed so they will be medicine and not candy. I get ReliOn fruit punch flavor from Walmart. They taste reasonably good to me, and cost $4 for a bottle of 50, or $1 for a tube of 10. If my BG is falling hard and I eat 2 or 3, I start to feel better within 5 minutes, and the CGM graph levels off and starts turning up within about 15 or 20 minutes. Actually I think I can just barely start to see the change in trend in the CGM graph after 10 minutes, but a fingerstick would show a faster response than the CGM.
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I like the tropical punch flavor, too, and I always wash ‘em down with some water: seems to speed things along. Oh yeah, mega-Smarties fit in an empty ReliOn GTab tube!
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I like the glucose tabs because of their speed and because I can count them for a dose (each tab raises my BG about 10 mg/dL). There’s nothing magic about it, though. Regular table sugar works, just takes an extra 5 minutes to kick in and I have to weigh it to get the right amount to land my BG at 100 mg/dL. More complex foods like cookies or chocolate or donuts can be significantly slower, but if it’s not an emergency I certainly agree with Doc’s “never waste a good low.”
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Be aware if you want to try experimenting with something different relatively inexpensively, that you can mail order from some Canadian pharmacies. You just need a prescription from your doctor to mail order, or a trip to Canada where you don’t need the scrip (insulin is over the counter).
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Whaaaaaa? Just hearing these things makes me truly loathe Americanized healthcare.
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@Necroplasm
A helpful way to treat when you are in bad shape is with a bottle of juice or some sweet drink and a straw.
If you are barely awake or barely conscious, anything you eat can be a choking hazard. But if you sip on a drink from the straw, there is a natural swallowing mechanism. The key is to have you propped up a little bit and let you take small sips of the drink from the straw. That way you don’t spill it all over yourself and you don’t choke on it.
If you are not zonked out, you can eat something, no big deal. I am just talking about when you are out.
That might be a good thing to discuss with your fiancé.
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Totally understand if it’s 50 times a night. Good God 
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