It takes a little bit of investigating at first to figure out exactly how your insulin pump will work for you. To help you with this your diabetes team will guide you through 4 different test days. On these days you will skip a meal and monitor and record your blood glucose to see how your blood glucose responds to your insulin pump.
Test days 1 to 4
Your healthcare team will let you know how they want you to optimise your pump.
One method requires you to complete a total of 4 test days. On each test day, you will skip a meal and see how your blood glucose reacts. We have put together some monitoring sheets that explain what you should do on each test day and when you should record your blood glucose.
Before starting this, check the requirements with your healthcare team.
These monitoring sheets are designed to help you see:
- How well your background or basal insulin is working.
- How well matched the insulin is to your meal
- How long your mealtime bolus of insulin lasts.
The monitoring sheets are available to download and print here.
Basal insulin
If your background or basal insulin is working effectively your blood glucose levels should remain stable when you miss a meal. A rise suggests not enough insulin, a fall suggests too much insulin. Your diabetes team can help you to make appropriate adjustments.
Post-meal
When these levels are stable, you can look at the pattern of blood glucose for 4 hours or more after the last meal to tell you how long that mealtime insulin bolus is working (this is the shaded area for each test day).
You should only miss one meal on any day. If you find it too difficult to miss meals, you can try the test by having carbohydrate-free meals or snacks such as plain meat, fish, or eggs with green vegetables or salad. Avoid fish or meat with pastry or breadcrumbs/batter.
The test days should not be consecutive – perhaps stagger them over 2 weeks.
If you have blood glucose below 4 mmol/L during the fast you need to stop and treat the low blood sugar. Abandon the test for that day. Don’t choose a day where you are being more active than normal or are unwell.
To continue, please click on the quiz below.
link not working for downloading monitoring sheets
Do the monitoring sheets tell you exactly how to do the fast etc? It needs some instructions
Post-meal
When these levels are stable, you can look at the pattern of blood glucose for 4 hours or more after the last meal to tell you how long that mealtime insulin bolus is working (this is the shaded area for each test day).
I assume you mean “When you are confident the basal insulin levels are stable, you can …..”
I assume the shaded area is on the downloadable monitoring sheets? -what if someone doesn’t open that link? -won’t know what shaded area is?
No quiz to click on?
Tracey – can you fix the link to the monitoring sheet and also send it to me, please?
Change “When these levels are stable, you can look at the pattern of blood glucose for 4 hours or more after the last meal to tell you how long that mealtime insulin bolus is working (this is the shaded area for each test day).”
to
“When you are confident the basal insulin levels are stable,, you can look at the pattern of blood glucose for 4 hours or more after the last meal to tell you how long that mealtime insulin bolus is working.”
Can you change “blood glucose” to “glucose” throughout, please?