Insulin Pump Renewal Time (again)

 Since being put on pump therapy I've had 3 changes.

The first pump I chose was an Animas 2020, followed by and Animas Vibe - then when Animas withdrew from the pump market the only option at the time was to go for a Medtronic 640g

The Medtronic works more or less exactly the same way as the Animas pumps did - i.e. it was a long way behind the other pump companies developments and was 'old tech' before I got it - 4 years on its a bit like watching Star Wars on VHS - ok at the time but looks like you need an eye test now

Advances in pump therapy mean we can now use pumps integrated with CGM to create a 'Hybrid Closed Loop' system - the pump works as an artificial pancreas as long as we tell it a few basic things (like how much we've just eaten) and it does the rest based on our current BG readings, IOB, etc.

I'm under Derby CCG for my Diabetes Care, and in Nottingham for everything else (prescriptions etc)

At pump renewal time I've been offered the following pumps:

• Medtronic 780g
• Omnipod Dash
• Tandem t:slim (possibly later in 2022)
• DanaRS or maybe Dana i (possibly later in 2022)

The big hit here is looping - Imagine how life changing it would be to be able to have my pump altering insulin in the background if I go high or low? Now that's attractive - so how to achieve that given there are only 2 pumps available?

Self fund sensors on the Medtronic - that's a minimum of £1820 per year - taking into account Derby are usually 12 months ahead of Nottingham in approving things - that could be £3640 before I get the kit to use Medtronic looping and wouldn't give me the tech for BG on a watch etc. - as it's not available directly (though there may be some fudge loading data into xDrip+ I guess)

I'll admit I'm not a fan of Medtronic - the pumps are 'ok' but suffer from cases cracking, there customer service has been terrible (improved over the last 18 months, but things like Christmas come as a complete surprise every year and you cant get consumables for your pump) etc. They also tie you entirely to their equipment and sensors - no open API or freedom to integrate kit that they don't make so I prefer not to use them

So the options are the Artificial pancreas open source apps on the internet - More on those shortly as they drive pump choice for me, to integrate with my existing Libre2 sensors