Thank you, Michel.
I was reading yesterday another superb thread by Eric on Filling your own pens. Today I went to Kasr El-Aini (an area in Cairo where pharmacies and medical suppliers converge, because of the hospital there by the same name) trying to find a pen with 1/2 units. Failed. The Echo is not in Egypt at all, and nothing else available had half-unit doses. But tonight I was seeing Juno’s endo and mentioned it and she reached into a cupboard and gave me a HumaPen Luxura HD! The same Eric shows so well how to hack and refill.
Juno has been on Apidra for bolus insulin, but the cartridges are filled with Humalog. I need to read and try assess whether to move him over or still with Apidra. I’m told Apidra doesn’t come in vial form here — only the Solostar disposable pens. As we have no insurance or anything like that I was hoping that the refillable pen would prove cost efficient in the long run. But without vials, it’s moot.
Today I did some testing to try to dial in Juno’s carb rise rate, carb to BG ratio, and insulin sensitivity. For the latter, I did a test on one unit of Apidra starting from 177 mg/dl and stable (+0 mg/dl) and letting it run. Sixty-five minutes in, when I pulled the plug, Juno had fallen 130 mg/dl, to reach 47 mg/dl with still a downward trend of -4.7 mg/dl. It was slowing and levelling out, but I’d seen enough. Juno felt nothing.
Astonishing to me, still, that just a few weeks ago Juno was bolusing 7 units of Apidra with every meal.