I’ve been wondering for a while about when will be the right time for me to switch insulin pumps because the pump I currently wear is no longer on the market and well past its warranty date by now. One of the main reasons I’m still wearing my Cozmo is that I’m a little picky when it comes to insulin pump features. I’ll write more about my my pump comarisons and decision process at another time but for now I want to throw out a question to the diabetes online community:

Does any pump on the market today automatically switch from a weekend to weekday basal profile on monday morning and back again on friday night? Even better, at a user specified day and time? I’d even accept a user-set reminder to do it manually.

Let me explain. All last week I was able to observe a very specific pattern emerge in my glucose levels. Every evening right around the time I was picking my kids up from school and getting home to put dinner on, my blood sugar tanked. So yesterday, being the beginning of a new work week, I was determined to be prepared. My BG was coasting at about 120 during the afternoon and about 45 minutes before I left work I ate 10g of carb in the form of dark chocolate figuring that the fat in the chocolate will keep me from spiking but that amount of carb should hold off the expected low.

The result? An hour later my BG had slowly and steadily risen to 182mg/dl. My first reaction was the typical frustration at diabetes for never acting how you would expect. Then I realised my own mistake. It was monday and I had left my basal profile on “weekend”. (So perhaps the real surprise was that my blood sugar hadn’t been higher all day with a lower basal rate than I usually have while sitting at my desk. I sense some more basal testing in my future!)

This is not surprisingly not the first time I had noted a need for a reminder to switch basal profiles. I don’t work wednesdays (a very common thing for mums in France as traditionally there is no school on wednesdays) so I switch back and forth between my weekend and weekday basal profiles twice a week. And I definitely forget from time to time.

Spending my monday with a weekend profile didn’t result in anything too dramatic. I corrected that 182 with a fraction of a unit of insulin, switched to the weekday profile and went on with my evening. For me, forgetting to activate the weekend profile can have more notable consequences with some pretty major lows on wednesday or saturday mornings. So an automatic switch or an integrated reminder would make a real difference to me in terms of having one less diabetes-related detail to think about 4 times per week.

While I’m at it, why don’t other pumps have a site change reminder feature?