OmniPod - Entering carbs without taking insulin

Tips, Tech & Gear Pump
1

Not sure if this is already well-known by the pod peeps here, but I don’t think it is documented anywhere. So I wanted to mention it.

You can enter carbs into your PDM’s records without taking insulin.

There is a place that lets you manually enter a BG even if you don’t use the meter, or even if you are not taking a bolus:
(More actions > Add BG reading).

But there is no place that is designated for you to manually enter carbs so that it goes in your records:
(My records > Carb history).

So if you want to enter carbs without taking a bolus (such as for a low correction), just do this:

  1. Go to Bolus
  2. You can choose to enter a BG or not, it doesn’t matter.
  3. It asks, “Are you going to eat now?”, select Yes
  4. Put in the carbs you want to enter.
  5. Hit the Confirm button.
  6. Now when it comes to the suggested bolus amount, just arrow it down to 0.00 U
  7. Hit “Enter” and then “OK”.
  8. The PDM says “No bolus will be delivered”, but the carbs are now entered even though you didn’t take insulin.

This is just a way of keeping all your carbs into the PDM, even if you are not taking insulin - such as for a correction or if you are doing an IM shot and not using the PDM.

Not sure if this is already known by most pod peeps, but if not, try it out.

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2

This is our method also. Some foods we actually bump up the dose using this method, and others we bump down, or zero.

3

So do you do this just to be able to see it in a Glooko report? Like if you were treating a low BG, and wanted those carbs to show up? Or do you track carbs in a different way?

4

Yes, we want to see as much data in Glooka as possible (I prefer less lows to “show up”, but Erin believes we should be honest with ourselves (which I agree with too), we log lows, carbs, etc., even when we’re not bolusing for them. (We TRY to do it all the time, but sometimes we forget to do it.)

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5

I tried a little test for you, in case you have to give Liam carbs for a low in the middle of the night and don’t enter them because it is 3am, but you want to enter them the next day, to kind of back-fill it.

If you change the date/time, you can entered the carbs, and then put the date/time back to current. And it might show up in Glooko correctly, but in the PDM it displays wacky.

It does not display the carbs in chronological order, it shows them in the order you entered them.

So your display might look something like this:

Carb history
12:10 PM 23 g
3:16 AM 5 g
10:22 AM 8 g
8:35 AM 20 g

The time you back-fill won’t go to the right place chronologically. It will display by order it was entered so it will look kinda stupid.

But, it may look okay in Glooko. I dunno about that.

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