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Home > Knowledge & support > Resource hub > My life as a teenager with hybrid closed loop
Being a teenager looks different for everyone, but something that’s quite universal is this: life is busy. My love for tennis, musical theatre, journalism and more often means I have to move quickly from place to place, and, in the past, this has often led me to delay or forget my correction boluses when my blood sugar runs high, or to have more lows from being up on my feet all day.
Since starting the hybrid closed loop system, rather than having to reduce my activity level or give up doing something I love, I can stay just as busy whilst being free from the pressure to constantly watch over my blood sugars.
When my sugars are slightly elevated, rather than continuously having to correct every few hours, I can rely on my Pod to increase my background insulin dosage based on the reading it receives from my Dexcom G7 sensor, without ever having to input my blood sugar myself.
Equally, I no longer have to engage in time-consuming preventative measures to avoid lows during the day. Instead, my background insulin automatically reduces or stops if my blood sugars begin to fall.
Another pressure I used to face before the hybrid closed loop came with playing sport; more specifically, choosing a pre-sport snack that had just enough carbohydrate value to stop me going low, whilst avoiding a high. Finding that balance often proved difficult for me, especially when I couldn’t access a regular snack that I knew I reacted well to. Now, though, that burden has been lifted largely off my shoulders through the hybrid closed loop’s activity mode, automatically setting my ‘target blood sugar’ to a higher value on my Pod, helping to prevent lows during sport (you do still have to turn on activity mode manually).
Having to stop playing tennis due to a low, particularly during a team game, was mentally frustrating, and whilst these lows due still occur occasionally, they are far less frequent than before. The option to choose the duration of this activity mode setting also means I don’t have to worry about resetting it during a long match, which is very practical, especially during school games.
In terms of life at home, the hybrid closed loop has vastly improved one aspect – my sleep (and, of course, the sleep of my parents…). The continuously adjusting background insulin has greatly reduced the amount of times I need to get up in the night to drink juice for a low, or that my parents have had to drag themselves out of bed to give me a corrective bolus. The system also helps to keep my sugars very stable during the night, whereas they used to fluctuate far more overnight, even if that didn’t result in lows or highs, which has reduced my diabetes stress overall.
Of course, the hybrid closed loop can’t do everything, but it certainly makes things easier. Sometimes I just want a snack and having the freedom to eat whenever I want without a long injection-taking and dose-calculating process is very liberating. All I have to do is manually enter the carbs of my meal or snack into my pump handset and press the ‘add blood sugar’ icon. Automatically, my Dexcom value is inputted into the pump handset automatically, and an adjusted dose is calculated. Having automatically calculated insulin doses saves me so much time when eating and generally reduces the stress of taking the wrong amount of insulin significantly. Above all, the adaptive nature of the hybrid closed loop system has been what’s changed my daily life the most. The load of acting as my own artificial pancreas feels significantly lightened, and that responsibility falls onto the system instead. Knowing I have the safety of the hybrid closed loop system has made me more open to trying different and unique sports, where I’m not sure what the effect on my blood sugar will be, which has given me varied and invaluable life experiences such as scuba diving, rock climbing, hiking and more.
This spring, Sam Morrison’s hit show Sugar Daddy landed in London, bringing laughter, vulnerability and the messy reality of life with T1D to the stage. We chatted to him about his journey navigating diagnosis, grief and identity.
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Nurse Elaine Conway-Huelin reflects on living with type 1 diabetes (T1D) for over 50 years and how much things have changed in her lifetime.
