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Posts tagged ‘high blood sugar’

Mar 23

13 Comments

One, Stupid High.

On any average day, my glucose meter results are just mine.

… mostly.  I worry about lows while I’m driving my daughter or traveling alone, but while a low might be witnessed by someone else, it’s my body that goes through the experience.  (Not to minimize the experience of watching diabetes from a distance; that’s a whole other post.)  The long-term influence of diabetes is still a process-in-progress, but on the whole, the individual meter results are mine to mitigate.

Right now, though, every number on the meter isn’t mine and only mine.  These days, every high and low and all the bits in between belong to me and the baby I’m creating.

No pressure.

I take this job very seriously.  It’s easier to play by every, single rule during pregnancy because there’s a definitive start and end to this process.  40 weeks marks the duration of an average pregnancy, which means that I need to be on the ball, knocking it out of the park, and other sports analogies for that timeframe.  It’s important to plan ahead, if you can, and it’s important to keep at it once the baby is born, but diabetes is truly only shared in tandem for 40 weeks.

Which is why one stupid high is enough to send me into a spiral of panic and wtfuckery.

Yesterday, things got stupid for a few hours and I saw a number on my meter that made the string of curse words come easily.  A pump site that needed to be changed and a Dexcom sensor that was repeatedly throwing wonky numbers and a pregnancy that is moving into the “upped insulin resistance” phase didn’t help matters.  It took an injection of insulin and hours of frustration (because my body thought, perhaps, I had injected water instead) for the number to move in the right direction.  The anger was intense.  As was the guilt.

I know that days of highs, not hours, adversely influence a developing baby, but holy shit.  This wasn’t just MY HIGH but it was OUR HIGH, and that left me feeling helpless.  The best laid plains of NOD mice and women still had me higher than I wanted to be and higher than I felt safe being.  I can deal with  blood sugar fluctuations as a soloist, but bringing a baby into the mix makes me want to make my standard deviation less … deviant.

Eventually, the numbers started falling, and I cried – a wimpy, gross cry – when I saw the 74 mg/dL on my meter because it meant that I was back in the game.  23 weeks left to go, give or take, before diabetes is “all mine” again.

(Note: Crying is not limited to blood sugars.  I also cried when the mailman asked me to sign for a package.  Hormones are weird.)  

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What A High Blood Sugar Feels Like. Halfway Point. Spring-Loaded Navel Gazing.

Oct 20

6 Comments

As a Kite.

Woke up to this little gremlin number on my meter:

Gross, gross start to the day. #DOCtober #diabetes

A photo posted by Kerri Sparling (@sixuntilme) on

I pulled my site and immediately blood streamed out, leaving a trail down the side of my hip and actually running onto the bathroom floor (which is DISGUSTING and makes me feel like queen of the macabre).  The site was sore and tender and 12 hours past the “three day” mark, which may explain why it went gross on me.

Regardless of the “why,” the day started with an insistent need to pee and then drink a ton of water from the faucet.  And then change my pump out.  And then rage bolus.  And then start the day determined to have this be the One Thing that Sucks today instead of letting it set the stage for a crappy Tuesday.

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Ketchup and Mustard. Dexcom Real Estate: Lower Back Edition. Bloody Cannula. (A Grost.)

Oct 15

10 Comments

When Good Insulin Goes BAD.

Ninety percent of the time, my high blood sugar has an identifiable reason, and there’s a cluster of common causes.  Did I under-estimate the carbs in a snack and therefore under-bolus?  Did I over-treat a low blood sugar?  Did I eat without bolusing at all (it happens)?  Is there a lot of stress floating around that I’m responding to?

Most of the time, those questions cover the why.  Once in a while, my highs are for rogue reasons, like an air bubble in my pump tubing.  Or when I eat something carb-heavy right after an insulin pump site change (it’s like that first bolus doesn’t “catch” somehow).  Or I forgot to reconnect my pump.  Or if the cat bites through my pump tubing.

But rarely, if ever, is one of my high blood sugars the result of bad insulin.

Except it totally happened last week, when two days of bullshit high numbers had me mitigating every possible variable … other than swapping out the insulin itself.  (And clearly I’m stubborn and/or in denial about the quality of my insulin’s influence on my blood sugars?)  I rage-bolused.  I exercised.  I low-carbed the eff out of an entire day.  I did a site change at midnight to take a bite out of the highs.  Nothing.  The downward-sloping arrow on my Dexcom graph had gone on hiatus.

(Always a punched-in-the-gut feeling to see the word HIGH on a Dexcom graph, accompanied by an up arrow.)

But ditching the bottle of insulin entirely and swapping in a new Humalog vial?  That did the trick in a big way.  For once, it was the insulin.  Next time, it will surely be the cat.

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Ketchup and Mustard. Despite Insulin … If I Knew Then: Insulin Pumps.

Sep 2

14 Comments

Not A Single Decent Number.

“Huh.  223 mg/dL.  Still.”

This was the mumbled mantra of our vacation to Maine.

Aside from the long drive to Bar Harbor (six hours, plus coffee stops and bathroom stops and “Hey, look at that lobster!” stops), the time we spend in Maine is usually very active.  As a family, we did the hike around Jordan Pond (about 3.5 miles), the hike up South Bubble Mountain (with a stop at Bubble Rock), and spent hours walking through downtown Bar Harbor.  The lure of blueberry ice cream was enticing, but I tried to avoid the sweets and instead downed buckets of iced coffee instead.

And yet my blood sugars were complete shit while we were traveling.

I wanted to blame my infusion set, but I changed it once while we were in Maine and my blood sugar numbers remained crap.  I wanted to blame the bottle of insulin but it was the same bottle that worked just fine at home (and it wasn’t like we microwaved it or let it bake in the car).  I wanted to blame my own actions but I was exercising, checking my blood sugar, pre-bolusing for meals, correcting highs, and sticking with reasonable carb intake.

So I blamed diabetes.

The graphs over the four days we were in Maine were gross.  When I wasn’t high (which was the majority of the time), I was erring on the side of high, teasing the edges of 160 and 180 mg/dL all day long.  Why?  No clue.  Hesitant to up my basal rate in the face of constant walking, I just watched the graph ride the mustard for a few days.  Not convenient, because blood sugars running higher means more water, more “Hey, it feels like someone put cement in my sneakers,” more teeth sweaters, more bathroom breaks.

“Mom, do you have to go potty?”

(Fun when the four year old is asking me, instead of the other way around.)

Sometimes the numbers don’t make sense, and this time, I choose to roll with it for a few days.  There are probably six dozen different things I “could have done” to take a bite out of the high blood sugar trend, but I didn’t want to the micromanagement of diabetes to eat up my brain on vacation.  Instead, I did what I was willing to do and thankfully, now that we’re back at home, my Dexcom graphed has settled back into a more forgiving pattern of Pac-Man dots.

I prefer mountains in the landscape, not in my Dexcom graph.

 

 

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“Popovahs!” Ketchup and Mustard. Clouding on the Road.

Feb 4

34 Comments

The Art of the Pre-Bolus.

"Fucking frost on my eggplants." Batman tries to wait patiently for his bolus to kick in.“So it’s a Wednesday night … what’s the chance we might not be seated right away?”

“Are you talking to me?” Chris asked, pulling the car into a parking spot near the entrance of the restaurant.

“Yeah.  Sort of.  I’m trying to decide if I should bolus now, because I’m 200 and I don’t want to be high all night.  Or eat ice for dinner,” I responded.

The science of a pre-bolus makes sense to me.  Take your insulin before you eat so that it’s active in your system when the food hits.  Or, in smarty-pants terms:  “A bolus of rapid-acting insulin 20 min prior to a meal results in significantly better postprandial glucose control than when the meal insulin bolus is given just prior to the meal or 20 min after meal initiation,” states the conclusion of this study from 2010 examining the influence of timing pre-meal boluses on post-prandial blood sugars.

I put this theory into practical application during the second and third trimesters of my pregnancy, when insulin resistance was constantly on the climb, as were my actual insulin needs (thank you, hard-working placenta).  Around the 22 week mark, I needed to pre-bolus approximately 25 minutes before a meal.  Around the 30 week mark, I was upping that time frame to 45 minutes prior to eating.  And now, without a baby on board, I still try to bolus at least 20 minutes before I eat.

Making the decision to pre-bolus is a precarious one, because the success of that decision rests in the quiet of variables.  (What, too esoteric?  I wrote that sentence from a cloud.)  Pre-bolusing only works when nothing else gets in the way of eating.

Exhibit A:

Yesterday morning, I woke up to a shiny 218 mg/dL on my glucose meter, so I wanted to make sure I pre-bolused for breakfast, since morning highs tend to stick with me well into the early afternoon.  (Little jerkfaces.)  I took my correction bolus and my meal bolus in combination with one another for my meal (eggs, avocado, and a slice of toast do not judge me for eating toast), and set about playing with Birdzone until it was time for breakfast.  Only the best laid plans of this PWD were derailed by a phone call, a frantic search for Carrots (Birdy’s stuffed rabbit, who happened to be in the dryer, a la Knuffle Bunny), and falling down the email vortex for a spell.  End result?  I skipped the toast and ended up chugging some juice with my breakfast.

Exhibit B:

Before dinner out at a restaurant, I decided not to pre-bolus in the car, assuming it would be some time before we were seated.  But (of course), we were seated and eating within 20 minutes of arriving.  Even though my blood sugar was in range when I sat down, I had a post-meal spike that looked like a rocket ship taking off.

Timing is only part of the art of the pre-bolus.  For people dealing with gastroparesis, trying to predict the absorption of insulin and food is tricky.  For kids with diabetes, the art is more Pollock-y, because who knows what a kid will eat/won’t eat/might lick and then hide in a plant?  The blood sugar number you’re starting from makes a difference (or at least for me), too.  I’ve found that if I’m high, I need to wait until I see a downward slope on my Dexcom graph before I can start eating; otherwise, I start high and end up higher.  And the time of day matters for me, too.  A breakfast pre-bolus definitely needs more time to kick in than a dinner one.

Pre-bolusing, for all of its variables, is one of the most useful things I’ve done to help lower my A1C.  Keeping my post-prandials lower helps my overall control, and every time I see my endo, she nods in agreement when I mention pre-bolusing.  (She also warns me about lows every time, because she’s a doctor and also extremely smart and always has cool sneakers on /digression)

Do you pre-bolus? 

 

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Ketchup and Mustard. The Price of Being Stubborn. Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery Wrapped in a Panda Bear.
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