Tresiba experiment

@Jen, I could send you a couple of you want.

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I will follow your thread eagerly!

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Well, I did it. :slight_smile:

First feedback: I hate the FlexTouch pen. Ugh! The entire pen feels plasticky and cheap compared to the NovoPens, and the clicks feel “mushy” and not at all firm when counting forwards and backwards. And I hated that there was no moveable plunger. As someone who relies on those clicks of the plunger to count up the dose and confirm its delivery, it did not feel good. If I stick with this long-term I’ll be hunting down penfill cartridges to use in my NovoPen 5 or Echo.

Anyway, I’ll keep my pump connected for the next two hours or so, because it looks like that’s how long Tresiba takes to kick in, then we’ll see what happens. I’m looking forward to having no pump to worry about for a while. Hopefully I won’t have to worry too much about rollercoaster BGs.

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I hated the new pen at first too but I’ve totaly gotten used to it. You can positively count the clicks while you’re dialing it up but you’re right there’s no way to as it injects
… you just gotta hold the button down til all the clicking stops then a few more seconds… it took a while to grow on me

@Jen, if you switch to Tresiba, since you have 2 days’ worth at any time, shouldn’t you still keep your pump on but at 1/2 basal dose until your second day of tresiba is injected and active?

I agree, I don’t know why they are pushing these disposable pens on everyone, especially when they can’t dose half units! Is Tresiba available in penfill vials in Canada? When I tried it the pharmacy gave me the disposable pens too.

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My main dislike is the clicks when counting up, and being able to count back a few units if I accidentally go too far. That’s my main dislike of the pen. Even other disposable pens (e.g., Lantus) feel better than this one. I’ll use the pens for this trial, but if I stick with it long-term, I’m pretty sure there must be Novo penfills out there somewhere, since they exist for every other type of Novo insulin.

I don’t know. I wondered about this… I could certainly do that, and have done something similar to that when using Lantus for pump breaks, but I wasn’t sure with Tresiba. If I’m finding that I’m running ridiculously high, I can always put in an infusion set a run a temporary basal rate.

I think they got rid of Levemir penfills in the States a few years back, so who knows. Beyond the fact that the pens feel cheap and are wasteful, I find dosing in half units is useful even for basal insulin.

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Maybe your endo practice has a switching protocol?

@Sam, how did you deal with the first two days?

Generally not recommended. You won’t get optimum performance out of tresiba for a couple days but combining multiple varieties of basal insulin is potentially dangerous and just complicates the whole issue… I have seen other people come up with all sorts of advanced strategies, but have never seen anyone who just switched wish they’d done anything different. I’d just switch to tresiba and watch your cgm and be prepared to correct as necessary.

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Accoridng to my endo, only the disposable pens are available. I’ve used refillable pens since I began using pens in the 1990s and greatly prefer them. They are higher quality and more environmentally friendly. Plus, when I take the cap off the FlexPen it looks like there’s just a Novo penfill cartridge in there! I may contact Novo Nordisk directly and enquire with them if I stick with this.

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The pump would not be using basal insulin, though. It uses only rapid insulin. So it’s not really combining different varieites of basal insulin.

I’ll see how it goes. If I’m running at 18 all night, I don’t really want to do that for three days, so I’d probably run a temp basal if that were the case, versus taking corrections every two hours day and night…

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Yeah, but you’d be using the rapid as a basal dose. if you want to leave the pump on I’d only use it to bolus. Tresiba will start working right away it just won’t reach 100% for a couple days. Eg there will potentially be minor frustrations the first day or two that won’t be there from then on… not to say it won’t be working

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That’s true, I saw someone remove the vial from a disposable pen on YouTube! You just need a spare plastic piece with the threads for the pen needle to fit onto the end of the vial.

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I think with someone who’s already taking basal it wouldn’t matter, because all basals will last several days in your system to some level (I was told that Lantus lasts for three days to a week to some degree, obviously at a very low level, before it wears off completely).

I have a protocol for taking pump vacations. It talks about Lantus, but I imagine Tresiba isn’t that much different. Even if it takes several days for the insulin to come to peak performance, I imagine most of its effect would kixk in right away.

Interestingly, my injection site feels kind of stingy and burny. :\ Hopefully not a bad sign!

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But the threads of the Novo cartridges are right on the cartridge itself? Unless on these pens it’s part of the pen and not the cartridge. That may be the case. It looked to me like it was a regular Novo penfill, but maybe it’s a slightly different design.

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Yeah clicking backwards doesn’t work well… I suspect you’d have to learn to just very slowly and deliberately count the clicks upwards much more carefully than with other pens

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So do I :laughing: I once tried a sample of Novorapid in the flextouch and they sucked compared to the old novo pens that were made of thick metal and nice an solid. I still have those kicking around somewhere.

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This is highly over rated. It worked phenomenally well from day 1 for me. I took Lantus Monday night, switched to tresiba Tuesday night and it worked perfectly the whole time.