Contact sports

My 5yo son currently wears the Omnipod. While it has worked great so far, I wonder about using it when he gets older and more into physical sports like football. Any comments regarding how they manage T1 with a pump in football would be great.

 

My son is 8 and in his second season of tackle football. He uses a tubed pump, but so far we just tuck his tubing into his pants and let him play. Once he gets older, I will worry more about him wearing his pump, because of damage concerns. When that happens, we will probably put an Omnipod on him somewhere like lower back or maybe thigh. He definitely needs to wear it during practice and games because he runs high because of the adrenaline.

 

my son is almost 15....he was on Omnipod, but when the pod was ripped off for the 3rd time during Rugby, he went back to shots. He's now playing football and no pod either. He'll wear it inbetween those seasons....He doens't mind the shots, has great numbers, so I don't mind. He carries an insulin pen and uses the PDM to calculate how much insulin to give....

 

My son is 9 and is playing flag football. He is on the Omnipod also. We have not had any trouble yet and he is an aggressive player.

 

Location of the pod is everything and quite dependent on sport and position. When Madison plays basketball she's a post and uses her backside and arms for pushing , so the pod goes on her belly. For fastpitch she does a lot of sliding and her pitching arm comes very close to her right hand backside, so the pod goes on her left backside. Swimming it goes where ever the bathing suit will cover it...

For a 5 year old football player, I would probably put the pod on his lower back and make sure he is wearing some compression style shorts under his football pants. The compression shorts just hold everything in place. Or if you use arms at a pod location I would wrap it well with stretchy medical tape, but be sure you know the league rules for that sort of thing.

 

Not a pod user, regular tubed pump, but our experience is that he does best when he disconnects during games. He has lows well after games/practices and highs during due to adrenalin. Being disconnected and missing a little basal actually works really well for him and helps with post game dips. There have been a few times he had to do a mid game correction but that's pretty rare and had more to do with bad food choices ahead of time than missed basal.

He leaves his pump on for stretching, pregame warmup, etc, then he disconnects for actual play. He stays connected for conditioning practices, watching film, that sort of thing but disconnects for any hitting drills or scrimmages. He's in the game pretty much the whole time though, so activity level is HIGH and he's the team's leading tackler so adrenalin is also high! He rips out his site fairly regularly during games so staying connected wouldn't be worth it anyway.

At younger ages football is going to be a lot different though, not sure if you were looking at the next few years or projecting into the future. Until they are truly doing tackle I would probably keep him connected and just protect the area well, putting it under pads.