Since 7th January, I’ve been getting myself familiarised with Levemir, having changed my basal insulin. The reasons for this were documented here: http://www.diabetes.co.uk/forum/threads/lantus-users.67760/#post-749779
Essentially the mechanism by which Lantus operates has been found to be less reliable than many of us would like it to be, and can cause sudden, unexpected, hypos with a massive magnitude (think an effective insulin overdose of up to four times what a user would normally take!!!)
As a result, I switched to Levemir, documented here: http://www.diabetes.co.uk/forum/threads/changing-basal-insulin-observing-what-happens-and-hopefully-providing-some-lessons-learned.70039/
The upshot is that I’ve got the Basal under control now and the Levemir gives me a flat profile on the fasting tests. I’ve ended up having to look at it as two separate basals. One overnight and one during the day. I do find that the duration of the Levemir is frustrating, as the amount taken in each of the two injections is not quite enough to get me through a twelve hour duration, so I end up with a correction shot of around 1.5u of Novorapid in the morning and dependent on whether I go to the gym in the evening, have to do the same thing then.
The alternative is to increase the basal amount, but then run with a steadily declining bg level throughout the day in order to achieve duration, and reducing bolus shots. Not something I’m enamoured about doing.
This process has been made significantly easier with the #freetylelibre though. It has made the monitoring of the basal tests far more effective thanks to the graph of where I have been at throughout the period. It has made it a lot more reassuring. Even with the gripes earlier in the blog, it has really made a difference.
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