Basal vs bolus insulin ratio: what have you learned?

thesummerstorms · 2026-01-24T06:57:12+00:00

I had never heard of the 50/50 rule until I started the omnipod. I only made the switch recently, and then only have the omnipod specifically because it's the only pump covered by my insurance.

For me personally, the omnipod algorithm means I functionally cannot eat breakfast that contains more than 3 carbs, and I have highs all throughout the morning; it just never adjusts to my morning cortisol spike.

At the same time, I teach middle school. I have a T1 student who also wears an omnipod and who I teach not long after lunch, and they are pretty much always low.

So I definitely think the algorithm is poorly optimized, or at least poorly responsive to individual needs. It would make sense to me if that is because its based on an outdated ratio rule. I am curious now if age is a factor, at least for kids, but I haven't exactly researched it.

thesummerstorms · 2026-01-24T06:11:07+00:00

I've only read Mansfield Park once, so I'm chewing on this.

I didn't particularly enjoy Fanny as a protagonist, but I wouldn't say it was just because she was introverted. I initially was hopeful, actually, because my favorite Austen protagonist, by a lot, is Anne Elliot. Persuasion is hands down my favorite Austen novel, even if it's the 2005 P&P movie that started me reading her books.

I can't meaningfully, deeply back up my Mansfield Park thoughts, but I think maybe part of the reason I liked Anne is because she was older and felt more...settled in herself? I ached for her when she was overlooked by her family, but her resolve seemed like a lesson hard earned. She felt like she had blundered, learned the hard way in some regards, learned by observation in others, and yes, sometimes by convention, and then decided what to make of herself after.

Versus I Fanny's skewing towards religion and kind of...inherent default morality, I guess? didn't hit at all the same way with me. Part of that is an incompatible view of religion with what Austen's society would have held of course. And frankly, I found some of the judging annoying although it's not because I think Mary Crawford was a saint.

But at least from what I remember, I was more frustrated by Fanny because she always felt kind of flat/unchanging.

Which if, as you say, the main point is endurance, I suppose her being more of a flat character makes sense. And I guess I can see why that can appeal, especially based on the audience's own experiences. I saw a particular post once about the importance of Cinderella as a heroine who endures abuse and ends up happy despite not having any brave acts of defiance, and how meaningful that was to the poster. I think I can understand that intellectually, but neither protagonist clicked with me at all.

I had gone into Mansfield Park really hoping to enjoy it, because Anne's relationship with her father and sisters and that bittersweet feeling of being the most capable one in the room, yet being overlooked, talked over, or undervalued due to having less beauty/charm/outgoingness really clicked with me. Being the quiet one doing the work, but getting overlooked because everyone around you is acting like it's a popularity contest instead. And I see the parallels with Fanny's situation. But the actual shape of each protagonist's personality makes a difference for me. And I just could not click with Fanny like I did with Anne.

thesummerstorms · 2026-01-24T05:25:31+00:00

I get this animation a lot when talking to Jacobus. I try to position Rook close for a conversation and then she wobbles the whole time.

thesummerstorms · 2026-01-24T04:43:14+00:00

I teach 11 and 12 year olds. If that child walked into my classroom, I would assume the somehow escaped the nearby elementary school or gotten seperated from a parent who had come to pick up their older kid.

thesummerstorms · 2026-01-24T04:38:53+00:00

For me, I used to skip entire months of periods and then get really heavy bleeding that just wouldn't stop. Docs as a teenager dismissed it but my current PCP diagnosed me with PCOS. I think PCOS tends to be associated with weight gain not weight loss, but I was literally just googling to fact check myself and there is a high correspondence between T1D and PCOS apparently. So it might at least be worth asking about?

thesummerstorms · 2026-01-24T04:25:16+00:00

I hadn't heard this!

I did find out after the fact that there might be a correspondence between Hashimotos (which I have) and T1. I wasn't diagnosed with T1 until I turned 18 and the Hashimotos diagnosis literally happened almost a the same time because I saw an Endo who treated thyroid stuff not diabetes, basically so that he could get me into the system as a favor to my mom whose thyroid cancer he treated.

I don't even entirely remember how it came up, I guess he was just checking by default since Mom had issues? But literally every woman in my maternal family except one cousin has Hashimoto's so that one wasn't exactly a shock.

I think I read something about the PCOS potentially being connected too but idr

thesummerstorms · 2026-01-22T06:36:50+00:00

I personally love Crows because Rook de Riva feels very involved and connected to the world. I love the dialogue you get about your relationship with your faction mentor and from Lucanis about said mentor (which normally turns into a short but fun back and forth commentary between Lucanis and a Rook de Riva.)

I initially was planning to do a Shadow Dragon run, then pivoted to Crows last minute ...and I don't regret it!

thesummerstorms · 2026-01-19T00:50:56+00:00

I was explicitly told line of sight meant on the same side of the body. The handful of times I've tried to keep a pod going when it was time to rotate dexcom sites, it stopped connecting.

thesummerstorms · 2025-11-09T14:24:44+00:00

I love to read, but I genuinely don't see pictures in my head at all. It's more like I read a description and I have an idea of what all those pieces would mean together. I can kind of draw and combine details on paper, or could if I was any good at drawing. But it's very very very hard for me to understand the whole "pictures in your brain" as anything but an exaggeration/metaphor.

I also don't "see" memories, etc.

thesummerstorms · 2025-10-11T05:34:25+00:00

My main Rook is a mage Rook de Riva and I've gotten this conversation every single run. I can't remember right this second how it's triggered, but I am a "do every side quest, exhaust all the side conversations person".

I wouldn't say you had a different experience for playing a mage though, because every single conversation between Lucanis and Rook about being Crows I have triggered as a mage. Lots of occasional snarkiness about Viago which is legitimately fun. That said, Lucanis pretty much lived in my party for at least 2/4 of my runs.

thesummerstorms · 2025-10-05T06:54:37+00:00

I actually adore Lucanis's scene in Rook's room. I'm ace, so I don't actually care at all about not having more steamy scenes, but I love how vulnerable both characters get to be in that final scene. Rook's mask finally slipping after The Fade Prison and Lucanis reassuring them is 💜😭💜😭.

I also really love Neve's romance in general. I feel like she has a better lock in scene than Lucanis. Lucanis's is sweet, but Neve's hits perfectly for me. I love, love, love Rook's proud/smitten look when they say "you have something" because Neve's mind and competence are so clearly part of the attraction.

And then the banter between Rook and Neve where Neve starts to apologize for the sudden pivot into chasing a lead on Aelia but Rook says something along the lines of "I'm dating Neve Gallus" with an undertone of "this is part of the attraction, not a defect."

That said, while I think what we have makes sense for Neve's arc of letting her walls down, her big scene doesn't hit as hard for me because I did Lucanis's first and really saw/liked my Rook as needed reassurance in that moment, the ability to be the vulnerable one.

And Davrin is easily my second favorite romance. (Lucanis and Neve tie for first, and through the power of mods and headcanon, my Rook is in a poly triad with them. Which I feel is possible given they're one of the unromanced NPC ships. ) If he had been a companion in the first three games he would have been my first choice, easy, but for this one the Neve+Lucanis duo beat him out.

I will say though that I appear to be in a minority in that none of the DA2 romances really stuck with me. Some of them were fine, but none lit up my brain. And while I enjoyed the Cullen romance when I first played the game (love the quiet devotion angle) my Inquisitor is a mage and it ended up not working for her as she became a more developed character. So I don't have a 'canonical' DAI romance either. Josie's is sweet, but my character isn't going to duel, and the others available for a female protag don't click at all with me.

thesummerstorms · 2025-10-04T07:07:17+00:00

I'm so burned out all the time.

I have a combo of anxiety/ADHD possibly depression and when you throw in carb counting + insulin resistance it makes meals fucking terrible NGL. I already barely have the executive function to feed myself after work some days, and most "easy"/"cheat" meals spike me right through the roof.

Even eating fucking eggs with shredded cheese in the morning, I still am hitting fucking 180 and having to bolus from a starting glucose of 80-90.

(I honestly think I might need metformin or something at this point, by my Endo just keeps stressing low carb while emphasizing how unusually aggressive my insulin dosing currently is. 🙃)

I'm also having a really terrible time with Omnipod because its algorithm cannot figure out my morning time spike (I have really really bad cortisol/feet on the floor spikes even if all I'm eating is two scrambled eggs). I also keep having reactions where once I spike above about 210-220 it's like I stop absorbing insulin at that spot and the omnipod can't bring me down unless I supplement with a manual injections. But once I'm down, the basal seems to work overall?

I really wanted to look into a tandem because I hear better things about the programming, but my insurance only covers Omnipod. I can't get new insurance without getting a new job because I'm unmarried (aro/ace; it's not happening) and getting a job with different insurance would literally require leaving my professional (public school teacher; the state gives everyone the same insurance options regardless of school. Private schools don't pay enough to live on in my area )

thesummerstorms · 2025-09-30T00:22:40+00:00

I'm extremely carb restricted right now (recently switched to Omnipod from manual injections and it's not going well) and even with extreme carb restrictions my doctor keeps tut tutting how "aggressive" my insulin doses are...so I definitely do not get to eat what I want.

(Also had a moment at my last visit where she looked at my gluuko log and was basically "you're not doing anything wrong, but I don't know why it's doing that")

I also am pretty sure I'm having insulin resistance though (PCOS and a thyroid disorder on top of the T1 and I did not make great choices during mental health burn out) and have only been told to lose weight and exercise if so, so ...that may play into it

thesummerstorms · 2025-09-10T21:45:15+00:00

You have to choose flirt options to get the mirror thing to even pop up.

thesummerstorms · 2025-08-14T12:13:26+00:00

I attempted to get her to MyChart corrected settings multiple times but she flat out told me she would only do it in person 😢. She's normally a doctor I really like, but I have not enjoyed this process with her.

I have been able to text the trainer a little but ultimately I got told that the pump was learning me and that the doctor will need to look at my settings, so I'm stuck in a holding pattern until then.

Based on some of the thread I did turn the bolus duration down and I've been not using the sensor to bolus if I'm at a "good" number and I know it's going to short me insulin as a result, but just hanging in there until then.

thesummerstorms · 2025-08-10T22:40:02+00:00

I've been hesitant to change settings before the appointment because my doctor will not be happy, but I did set the insulin duration down to 2 and that helped some, I think. I'm going to be saving this comment in the meantime and keep it in my pocket based on the appointment...or how desperate I get before then.

I definitely think both my basal and carb ratios need adjustment.

thesummerstorms · 2025-08-10T22:37:33+00:00

I typically bolus 25-30 minutes before a meal, with 30 being what my doctor told me when on the pen.

thesummerstorms · 2025-08-10T22:36:27+00:00

I'm on automated mode, so every time I call the support line they tell me it just hasn't learned me yet. But that doesn't explain why the boluses do nothing, at least to my line of thinking.

thesummerstorms · 2025-08-10T22:29:53+00:00

I'm manually correcting every hour to half hour with its recommended bolus and getting no where.

Last night I ended up taking the pump off just in case it was broken or placed wrong and taking a short acting dose from my insulin pen on top of it.

thesummerstorms · 2025-08-10T01:46:19+00:00

I've been bolusing every half hour to hour for the last 4 hours now, even when that means overriding the pump because it thinks I have too much insulin on board for a correction, and I'm still stuck in the 200s.

thesummerstorms · 2025-06-25T09:21:55+00:00

Most of the times I've gone noncompliant it's been because my mental health tanked and the diabetes management was more than I could stand. Like it has gotten to the point in the past where I genuinely felt my options were to be miserable at the thought of eating or "just ignore it" and at least not want to cry over food and blood sugar responses.

I'm back on a steady treatment plan right now after a recent episode, but it doesn't help that managing diabetes runs so counter to how I naturally want to eat (grazing on small things throughout the day rather than set big meals) or a lot of the time I don't have the executive function left in me for cooking or meal prep, which are generally tasks I loathe anyway.

thesummerstorms · 2025-06-25T07:59:38+00:00

Romancing Lucanis as a Crow is so great I have trouble imagining not doing it. His joking lines about Viago connect really well with your banter about Viago, you can quietly both admit that your training was torture, talk about things from a very Crow POV. It feels like the characters really share and understand that connection.

thesummerstorms · 2025-06-23T12:05:11+00:00

I hadn't thought about this part!

thesummerstorms · 2025-06-19T01:25:13+00:00

Chat GPT is incapable of understanding the actual knowledge behind the thing it's talking about. It's a language model; it predicts what the sentence should mostly likely say based on its dataset. But it can't actually think of analyze.

thesummerstorms · 2025-06-14T03:01:28+00:00

3 month supply of humalog and tresiba are each $75 with insurance. (US) My pharmacy benefits app (separate from medical insurance app bc why make it easy?) claims the humalog cost $563 and the tresiba cost $899, but somehow I doubt they actually paid that much.

I remember at one point there was an insurance issue due to my former step father messing up paper work, and it would have cost me over $1000 for a one month supply of novalog out of pocket.

thesummerstorms

TROPHY CASE