My Research on Looping
Where do I even begin this post? There is so much information out there on looping. It is overwhelming… in a good way.
I’m not sure about you, but I struggled a lot early on with diabetes. While type 1 (or 1.5?, this is another post altogether), I wasn’t diagnosed at a super young age, plus I didn’t manage it very well until I was older. My a1c has been pretty consistent the past couple years and my various doctors that I visit regularly are happy. However, that doesn’t necessarily reflect my experience with my blood sugars on a day to day basis. I struggle with getting back in range when I’ve had high fat meals. I’m sure you can guess which meals those are. I love foods that I shouldn’t and I don’t think I’ll ever adjust to not eating certain things. We are human after all.
In Alberta, pump therapy can be covered by the government. Only the pump though, CGMs are not covered. Given the emergence of DIY pump therapy in recent years, the government has not been swift to change the pump program. In fact, they were keen to change it last year, until there was an outcry from the public.
At an appointment with my endocrinologist earlier this year, I asked about how to lower my a1c and get in range more often on a day to day basis. He recommended looking at pumps. I won’t lie, I didn’t know much about them at all and was turned off by the idea of changing my lifestyle to adapt something new at first. However, he mentioned it again at another appointment and said something about looping that caught my ear.
I went home and started reading about Looping and the first thing I came across was Loop for iPhone when I googled. This is not surprising given it seems to be the largest supported ecosystem with a wealth of knowledge out there on it.
Fast forward to a month ago. I learned that the Diabetes Clinic I attend would become a new “pump site” that can get patients onto the pump program. Given the years long waitlist at the Royal Alex hospital here in Edmonton, I thought, hey, put me on this list too. Maybe it will go faster, and, guess what? I got a call a few weeks ago that they were moving ahead with consult appointments to discuss eligibility and then application to Blue Cross. I was stoked. As someone that is fairly tech savvy, I learned how to build Loop through xcode and tossed it on my phone in advance. I’ve added my Dexcom CGM to it and used a “dummy” pump to observe how it handles things. The more I read about it, the more it sounded like a much better solution that my current way of doing things. However, this week I stumbled upon OpenAPS and learned that a team of developers recently made a fork of that to put the APS algorithm (different than Loop) onto the iOS environment called iAPS. They have a great explanation on their documentation of what the difference is. For me, one of the key things is that I often struggle to get back into range and iAPS seems to do a much better job at automatically getting you back into range.
I also found a great video over on Loop and Learn of folks explaining their experience with iAPS and why they prefer it over Loop. Their experience fits me perfectly.
If you read this far, well, thanks I suppose. You might be asking. You haven’t even used a pump before, why choose one direction over the other and why choose one platform that is newer than the other? Well, DIY Looping hasn’t been around that long to begin with and I wanted something that is evolving quickly. BC Diabetes has staff that contribute to the project and looking at their roadmap, you know they are moving in the right direction.
Personally, my next step is to start on pump therapy, and, if all goes well, I really want to jump into learning Swift UI development and start contributing down the road. I found a guide to learning Swift over 100 days and one of the key tenets is to post about your learnings each day, so that will be part of what I use the blog for, as well as my own experiences with being on a pump.