This. Is. Awesome.

And it begins! Yesterday I was hooked up for the first time to the Artificial Pancreas cell phone platform, but up until this morning it was being used the same way my regular omnipod insulin pump would have been. Most of yesterday was working out the technical aspects of the various components. The initial configuration involved 2 fanny packs, one camera bag and two receivers for the CGMs, and quite a bit of what I'll refer to as tinkering to get everything in place and communicating well with each of the other systems.  To tell the truth, I felt like Tim The Tool Man Taylor with my belt of fanny packs and it was kind of awesome. Despite going low at around midnight, my sugars stayed pretty stable throughout the night even though the sensors seemed a little sensitive and needed to be calibrated a couple of times. But hey, if all that happens overnight this time is a finger stick every few hours instead of an IV blood draw every 30 minutes, I'm not complaining one bit! 

This morning after taking what I would consider a world record short shower (just over 4 minutes!) to prevent losing my connections with the systems, we went into closed loop mode and let the Artificial Pancreas do its thing. We had a minor road bump with the breakfast bolus that set off a hypoglycemia alarm, but a quick system reset put everything back in check and the rest of the day so far has been smooth sailing. 

As a general rule I try not to bore anyone by listing the things I've done today, but I feel like this is probably an exception so here we go: I ate lunch around noon which was macaroni and cheese, and then I'd like to say I did something grand with my day in the hotel, but the reality is that I decided to take a nap. So for about an hour and a half I slept and I didn't have to worry about my blood sugars because the Artificial Pancreas was doing exactly what it was supposed to do.  My sugar went up a little, it increased my basal a little, and my sugar stabilized. My sugar began to drop a little and it decreased my basal a little, and it stabilized again. I've been up for a few hours now and still feeling great. To say that this is the most incredible thing I've ever seen is a very serious understatement. THIS IS AWESOME! And I didn't have to tell it to do a thing! I didn't have to decide what percentage to decrease my basal rate by or for how long, I didn't have to decide if a correction bolus was necessary and if so was the bolus going to be enough.  It made those decisions for me and did exactly what I would have tried my best to do. Today it's taken the weight of being diabetic off of my shoulders, and it's not even dinner time yet!