Being a thermostat is fucking exhausting. My wife and I are the equivalent of a thermostat for our type 1 diabetic son's blood sugar. It's in our face 24/7.
In a way it's eliminating too much mental effort; while it's useful as a backup, the fact I sometimes completely forget to take insulin with meals is not ideal, even if the closed loop notices and takes care of it for me (since there's inherently more lag when relying on the loop than if I dialed in the insulin at meal time).
I have the Omnipod 5 which is decent, but it's "closed loop" abilities are extremely conservative and a bit disappointing. I've considered going the full way with androidaps, but haven't taken the leap yet.
Are you using a Dexcom with your omnipod? My impression is that the quality of sensor is the most important factor; with a flaky sensor looping algorithms will be more conservative since they (reasonably) prioritize avoiding lows.
Nice!
> I enter carbs but only to a resolution of 10g; and as I mentioned earlier I sometimes forget to enter them entirely.
I'm pretty bad at accurately entering carbs. I eat out enough that I've just gotten to the point where I just come up with a rough estimate (which is often wrong). Which means I have to adjust later pretty frequently with snacks or correction doses. Not ideal, but I got so much "carb counting fatigue" over the years.
> Are you using a Dexcom with your omnipod? My impression is that the quality of sensor is the most important factor; with a flaky sensor looping algorithms will be more conservative since they (reasonably) prioritize avoiding lows.
Yeah, I'm on the G6 still. I think the quality of my readings is pretty good, but the Omnipod 5 algorithm is pretty conservative anyway: rather than naturally bringing you down from a high, you usually have to explicitly give yourself a correction dose. Which I suppose makes sense, but I have read that some people have had a lot more success with looping in Androidaps vs the Omnipod 5's algo.
I also wish you could set the "target" a bit lower in the 5. You can't tell it to target below 120: I feel like 100 or 110 would be more reasonable, but again, it makes sense that they prefer being conservative.
A CGM and insulin pump have made my life easier.
How old is your son?
The mental burden is SO HIGH for both the person with the condition and their caregivers. At some point if it feels right, it might be worth having him see a therapist or a counselor who specializes in chronic diseases. There's a very high correlation between depression and type 1 diabetes (last I read, you're like 300% more likely to experience severe depression as a T1D.) Especially once he goes into his teenage years, that's a really hard time for a lot of us diabetics (and sometimes during the "rebellious" phase, a kid will intentionally stop taking care of their diabetes).
> His pump beeps at him so often he's just become accustomed to it and ignores it
This is a real problem with insulin pumps and CGMs, because alarm fatigue is a real thing. It makes me mad that they insist on putting in all these alarms you can't configure, because eventually you just start ignoring it. For my CGM, I use xDrip which gives me much more customization around my alarms: I just leave on the ones that are important to me.
Then, I know people with autistic kids. Wow.
This applies to so many things, not just health. You only appreciate it when it happens to you, or you get a snapshot of someone else’s life and it humbles you.