Insulin pumps – “Pumping Insulin Like A Champion!”

Posted on March 9, 2011 by John Wilkinson Leave a comment

The main reason for this site is to help type 1 diabetics that are having difficulty in controlling their blood sugar levels and having good A1C readings through my book “Pumping Insulin Like a Champion”. Prior to going on the insulin pump, I explored with my physicians diabetes treatment regimens involving pills, shots, multiple shots per day, and multiple kinds of insulin in multiple shots per day. None of them brought any real stability in my blood sugar levels. Then I worked with my doctor and went through the process of learning about insulin pump and deciding if I should give them a go. My doctor helped me set up my initial pump settings based on my insulin shot therapy. Of course I saw my doctor about every 3 months and took my blood sugar readings and we made some small adjustments together. The pump manufacturer also provided some helpful information that assisted me in making the initial change over to the insulin pump. I started feeling better soon after. I also found that insulin pump therapy was a much better simpler fit to me than insulin shot therapy.

I do live an active lifestyle. I exercise aggressively by doing Tae-Bo advanced kickboxing, weight training with a Bow-Flex machine, climb hills, jog, as well as doing and teaching high impact aerobics. I have had a demanding jobs that required travel, long hours, some shift work, and a variety of challenging projects over my career. I also enjoy doing fun and recreational things as well like regular dates out with my wife and going to a variety of restaurants, playing musical instruments, working with flight simulators, and many other things as well. All the treatment methods I have used prior to the insulin pump had forced me to make numerous compromises with my life style and health. The insulin pump removed those constraints and gave me back an open door to living!

But then I had a shocking realization. Even though insulin pumps are very versatile; neither doctors, their staff, or the insulin pump companies are set up or equipped to help an insulin pumper to make the continued adjustments and life adaptations that are needed day by day. There is much more that you need to learn to get the big health benefit.

Thankfully, I have a scientific background due to my training and my 40 years working for and with NASA. Over the last 27 years I have used this experience to find solutions to not only adapting to living with an insulin pump, but also how to take the insulin pumping way beyond basic therapy and to the next level. These solutions that I sought out had to be simple and practical, otherwise I would not keep employing them.

As my doctors began to see improvements in my A1C readings and my health, they began to question me about what I was doing and I shared some of the improvements with them. Both my primary physician (an internal medicine specialist), and my diabetes/insulin pump specialist strongly suggested that I write a book that would make this information available to help a lot of other diabetics.

I am motivated to help other diabetics to lead healthier and more satisfying lives. In the past I have helped a few individual adults and children but that only helps a few. I have shared a few techniques with insulin pump user groups, but that also helps only a few people. But sharing the ideas fully in book form could help so many more.

I have compiled all these practical and easy to use solutions in this book. It took months to write and is over 100 pages of helps organized in quick lookup sections. You can just flip to the section on whatever you need help with. It would have been great if I could just have bought this book over 25 years ago, but the information was not available. OK, so what kind of help could you get from this book?

These are the basic questions:
* Is an insulin pump for me? Do I really need one?
* What is an insulin pump? What do they do? How would one help me?
* Insulin pumps are not cheap … why would insurance companies want to cover most of the cost? How could it be cheaper in the long run?
* What are the major insulin pump companies and what are their leading insulin pump models and how do they compare?
– Medtronic Mini-Med Paradigm 522 Pump review
– Medtronic Mini-Med Real-time Revel Pump review
– Animas Ping Pump review
* What features of insulin pumps are important to me and how do I decide on one?
* What kind of doctor would help me most with insulin pump therapy? What should I look for when I visit one of these doctors?
* How do I adapt my life to living with an insulin pump? How do I sleep, or travel, or exercise, or go to a restaurant, or deal with sick days? What about intimacy?
* What about children needing an insulin pump? What pumps are best for children? Do children need to be a certain age to use an insulin pump?

These are the ‘next step questions’ that release the big benefits of living with an insulin pump:
* There is a super important feature of insulin pumps that has saved my life once, and helped numerous other times. I would not accept any insulin pump that did not have this feature, and I will always make use of this feature. What is this life saving feature? How do I know it is one an insulin pump that I am considering? How do I use it?
* How do I tune an insulin pump to give me good blood sugar control? By the way, this is not hard to do. How do I know when an adjustment is needed? How do I decide for sure what needs to be changed? How do I make the changes safely so I am not at risk?
* What kind of records do I need to keep for tuning my pump and keep it tuned? What can I do with those readings so my doctor can readily understand them and can make suggestions to me on my checkup visits?
* How do I keep my fingers from getting sore from taking so many blood sugar readings?
* How do I keep my infusion sites healthy and not sore and not building up scar tissue?
* Why is exercise so important?
* When I was on shots, I had to eat as many carbohydrates as I was exercising off. How can I loose weight and stay trim if I have to eat those same carbohydrates back? This was a big frustration to me that I only found answers to in the last few months.
* What about those between meal snacks that I had to eat when I was on shots? Do I still have to eat all of those? Is it easier to keep good control if I eat those in between meal snacks or is it easier to avoid them when on an insulin pump?

* How can I use my pump to help me lose weight and keep it off? This is a powerful benefit of the pump that is not very practical with shots.

Additional helps: The forms that I developed to keep track of blood sugar readings and tuning a pump are available for free download on the ‘Free forms from the book’ menu tab. If you have Microsoft Office Powerpoint and Excel, or if you have the free equivalents from Sun’s Open Office you can download and directly edit the very same forms that I am using. If you do not have these applications, you can still download PDF equivalents of these documents that you can just mark up with pen or pencil to personalize them for your need before copying them to get the same benefit.

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Insulin pumps – Great weight loss tool

Posted on March 8, 2011 by John Wilkinson Leave a comment

With shots you are locked into a diet with a certain amount of carbohydrates planned into every meal. If you eat less than that your blood sugar drops low because you had more insulin than it took to cover your meal. With shots you also need to eat in between meal snack to keep your blood sugar from dropping low between meals. Why is that?

Good question! It is because with shots, you need to take a time-released insulin and the time release curves of the insulin are not precise enough to match a standard 3 meal a day diet. It also draws the blood sugar down in between meals as well.

But the insulin pump brings with it a powerful tool that helps you adapt to the food you actually consume at the time you actually eat it. Of course this is a double edge sword. You could use it to eat a lot of unhealthy or unnecessary foods and leave you feeling miserable now and be stuck with the added weight later. In my book “Pumping Insulin Like A Champion” I show you how to harness this built in power in your insulin pump to manage your weight no matter whether you need to loose weight, gain weight, or hold your weight.

There is a healthy weight for your body. And there is a healthy BMI or body-mass-index for your body as well. You will feel the best when you are in a healthy weight range and a healthy BMI range. So how do you know what is healthy for you? Visit your doctor and talk this over with them. They can tell you if you are out of balance, and help you set healthy target that work best for you.

Non-diabetics can exercise more, or eat more or eat less and their pancreas will adapt to all the related changes in insulin demands. Yeah … that would be nice, but I am a diabetic!

Exactly! But enter the insulin pump into your corner before you have that next fight between your fork and your weight. The tool on the insulin pump that helps push the battle into your favor is the bolus insulin amount for a meal. You can set the number of carbohydrates of the meal to match the food you are consuming. So if you choose to eat a lite bread with that sandwich, and get some water or tea instead of that diet drink, and get a piece of fruit instead of that piece of pie, you can set the new number of carbohydrates and you WILL lose weight over time.

My book has a lot to say about this to help you. But also there are discussions about how to use exercise to help loose weight and improve your BMI. The book also covers how to fine-tune your pump so you are not having to regularly consume extra calories just to bring up your blood sugar.

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Adapting to an Insulin Pump – Not so scary after all …

Posted on February 22, 2011 by John Wilkinson Leave a comment

My book “Pumping Insulin Like a Champion” covers all the little secrets that I use to adapt my pump to my life and my life to the pump. I want to give you an idea of what is involved. First of all, an insulin pump is prescribed by your doctor. You can’t buy one on Ebay or Craig’s List. If your doctor has other diabetics that are on insulin pumps (and I sure hope they do otherwise you should probably be looking for a different doctor), they will have a relationship with one or more insulin pump companies.

Your physician will determine what your initial insulin pump setting are based partly on your insulin shot therapy and the knowledge of how to estimate starting settings for your insulin pump. Over time, your doctor will help tweak your pump settings to give you better blood sugar control. However you will find that unless you are a very stable diabetic and your blood sugar readings just do not jump around much, more help will be needed than that to fit better to your life needs. This takes more time and effort than can be done with a visit to your physician every 3 months. This process of fine-tuning of your insulin pump settings is covered in detail in my book. Fine-tuning your pump though is a step well beyond just adapting to the pump.

I found simple solutions that make adapting to the pump easy also in the following areas. All are covered in detail in my e-book.
- eating out at restaurants with a pump
- sleeping with a pump
- exercising with a pump
- traveling with a pump
- intimacy while on a pump
- bathing with a pump
- sick days with a pump
- importance of an understanding partner

Some of these life changes can seem bigger initially than they need to be once you see simple life adaptations to each one. I have found that in the end, none of these topics will be hard to overcome once you have a solution in mind.

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Insulin Pumps – Need one? Which one?

Posted on February 22, 2011 by John Wilkinson Leave a comment

How did I know that I needed a pump? How did I decide that I was willing to make the changes necessary to go on a pump? Would I make the same decision now? If insulin pumps are new to you, then you are probably asking yourself and your doctor all of these questions. While I do answer them in detail in my book “Pumping Insulin Like a Champion”, I would like to give you a summary of them here as well. Once you decide you do need an insulin pump, then your next question is going to be, which one?

The first question was ‘How did I know that I needed a pump?’. That is a good place to start. I had been trying diligently to make insulin shots work. I had seen some older diabetics come into my doctors office with some obvious diabetes related physical problems, and it make me think what I would need to do to give myself the best chance of staying healthy and either eliminating some of these serious side effects, of postponing them for a very long time. I knew that since I had a lot of high and a lot of low blood sugar readings that changes in my therapy were needed. But there were other reasons too. Travel was one. With my job, I needed to take business trips. With shots, these trips were a big problem to my insulin shot therapy. Between flight times messing up meal times, different food messing up preplanned insulin levels, different timezones messing everything up, long meetings making meal times unpredictable all left me feeling like I could not adapt well to travel which limited my job performance. Handling having to work different shifts from time to time was tough. Another area was exercise. I like to live an active lifestyle. I like to walk, and run, and climb hills, and do aggressive high-energy aerobics such as Tae-Bo kickboxing, and do some weight training on a Bow-Flex, and go sailing on a Hobie-Catamaran. All those actions burn energy. They have a big effect on insulin needs. Doing them on insulin shots was not impossible, but I did have to eat a lot of extra food to balance every exercise type I took on. Eating like that defeated a lot of what I was trying to accomplish with exercise. There were many other areas that cried out for a better solution than shots.

The next question is ‘How did I decide that I was willing to make the changes necessary to go on a pump?’. I have 2 answers. First is that when I saw what the limitations to my lifestyle was with shots, and how poor my blood sugar control was, and saw the complications that other patients were experiencing who were not able to maintain good blood sugar control, I was open to a change. Second, I met someone just going on a pump who is a real pumper hero named Roberta Weaver in Orlando Florida. She went on to form the Orlando Florida Insulin Pump Group at Orange Memorial Hospital. Roberta gave me more hope and courage. If Roberta could do it, so could I!

For the next question, ‘Would I make the same decision now?’. My answer is ABSOLUTELY YES. For me, there is no other game in town.

As for the last question ‘Which one?’, there are more than one insulin pump that meet my requirements today. There are several that do not. Insulin pumps have changed in many important ways in the 27 years I have been a pumper. The current crop of insulin pumps come in a bunch of cool colors, and have many common features, yet they also have distinctions that are important. My book covers what insulin pumps do, all the major features that will be important to you, special features that add value that are offered by particular insulin pump models, what pump I have now, and which pump I am likely to upgrade to once my warranty runs out.

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Insulin Pumps – Easy setup and forget?

Posted on February 22, 2011 by John Wilkinson Leave a comment

Most people using insulin pumps today are coming from insulin shots. They have found shots to not be effective in keeping them healthy. That was certainly true for me as well. I worked with my doctor and collected a large number of blood sugar readings and tried for years to get shots to stabilize my blood sugars. Finally it became obvious to me and my doctor that I needed something beyond shots to stay healthy.

So I went on the pump. My doctor used information from my shot therapy to setup my insulin pump initially. This is a huge help and one that I was thankful for. From time to time, my doctors suggested small changes to that initial therapy. I am a brittle type 1 diabetic whose insulin needs changed and my activities screamed for a lot more freedom. Was I stuck with these initial pump settings and small tweaks from my doctor every 3 months? Was that the best I could get from a pump? I was still getting lots of highs and lots of lows. My fingers were getting some from all the blood sugar checks. Some of my infusion sites were getting sore. My A1C readings were still high. So for me and I expect very many young diabetics the answer has to be … NO THE PUMP HAS TO DO A LOT MORE FOR ME THAN IT IS DOING NOW. The insulin pump is NOT a set and forget device when the patient is young and active and probably a bit brittle as well. It turns out that insulin pumps are actually very flexible devices that can adjust very well to our lifestyles, activities and changes in our body’s needs.

Thankfully over the past 27 years, I have discovered that fine tuning an insulin pump and getting it to adapt to my body’s needs and my active lifestyle is a straight forward process that can be easily and safely applied once you know the techniques. Parts of the process can be repeated whenever you discover that something has come out of balance and you begin to see more high or low blood sugar readings.

It does not need to take you 27 years like it took me. This site was created to help other insulin pump users, or those considering an insulin pump to lead healthy and happier lives with a lot less stress. How to accomplish this is presented in my book “Pumping Insulin Like A Champion” which is available on this site.

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