Sick Day

Today I'm at home in bed. I've already slept for most of the morning.

Cold? Flu? Stomach bug? Nope, this time (for a change) it's really due to diabetes.

I ate a relatively carb free meal last night. When I woke up at 1 AM with my mouth like sawdust thinks immediately didn't feel right. My blood glucose was 301 mg/dL. So I dutifully bolused, adding an extra 15% to the dose because correcting those super highs definitely takes more insulin. I even used a Super Bolus to move some of my basal delivery forward. Drank about 20 ounces of water and went back to sleep.

Woke up again around 4 AM. Mouth still sandy. Blood glucose had dropped to 258. Clearly all was not right with my insulin delivery. So I took a correction shot using an insulin, ripped out my infusion set and replaced it. And added some additional units of insulin. Having my Dexcom gives me more freedom to slightly overdose because it will wake me (or my wife) if I go too low. And downed another 16 ounces or so of water.

Woke to the alarm at 6:15. Tested and it was...246. What's going on?? At this stage I'd taken almost half my normal daily dose between the hours of 1 AM and 4:15 AM. Looked at my new infusion set and it had blood in it. So ripped that one out and replaced it. And drank more water.

Note: Drinking a lot of water when my blood sugar is high is something I learned many years ago. It helps your body reduce the sugar concentration in your bloodstream and it eases the strain on your kidneys of taking the sugar out of your system. Plus high blood sugars give you cotton/sawdust/sandy mouth and you just need water. But don't stop at just one glass.

Looking at my Dexcom, my blood sugar had been above 240 since before midnight (sometimes a lot above). I felt lousy. So replaced my infusion set again and overdosed slightly again and went back to bed.

No breakfast, high blood sugars and feeling exhausted definitely put me on the candidate list for a sick day. I managed to sleep from 9:30 till noon and feel a lot better. Having blood sugars under 150 is priceless.

Moral of the story. Sometimes diabetes just wears you down. Now if I hadn't been using an insulin pump I might have been better off in this case. But this kind of stuff only happens may once every two years or so. So I'll take it over constant shots.

Labels: Dexcom, infusion set, insulin pump, sickday

posted by Bernard @ 2:40 PM 13 Comments Links to this post  

2:30 AM infusion set change (yawn)

If you're a pump user and you've never had to do one of these, hands up.

Ok, the young man in the back. How have you managed to escape changing your set in the wee hours of the morning?

OK I see, your mom does it for you.



For the rest of you. I guess that at some stage of your pumping life you've had to change a set in the early hours. And this morning, it was my turn.

What a pain it is to have a CGM at a time like this. It looks like my readings had started to climb around midnight and when I woke up I had a high of 240 mg/dL according to the Dexcom. And a value of around 280 according to my meter.

But looking at the Dexcom readings for the previous 3 hours it seemed a set change was just a good idea. I'd corrected just before bed and my numbers just kept climbing from there.

Note to Dexcom engineering: Please add an additional alarm that will tell me if my blood glucose has been above a certain value for more than a set number of hours. It would have been nice if I'd done this set change at midnight instead of 2:30 AM.

Labels: CGM, infusion set

posted by Bernard @ 2:55 AM 5 Comments Links to this post