Two (bad) days

I'd like for this to be a happier, more upbeat post, but unfortunately, it's not.

Yesterday (Sunday) was a very sucky blood sugar day.

It actually started on Saturday night. Meg and I spent Saturday in the city doing some Christmas shopping and each of us getting haircuts (as odd as that sounds). We decided to stop in at a favorite Italian restaurant of ours. Meg gets the same dish there every time: bow tie pasta with prosciutto and mushrooms in a cream sauce. I don't eat the fungus, so I can't really speak to the spell it has cast on my wife, but she loves it.

I ordered penne pasta with "Mariscos del Adriático"

That is

"Seafood from the Adriatic Sea." Though I seriously doubt those shrimp and scallops and mussels were all the way from Adriatic sea (at least I hope not!).

close

and severly underestimated the duration that the carbs would affect my blood sugars.

I thought I had done a pretty good job of estimating when 2 hours post-meal I was at 126, but then at 3 hours post, I was at 168 and at 4 hours post I was at 273. I know that I gave at least a portion of the bolus as a square wave, and I know that I corrected like crazy once I was at 273 before going to bed. I even woke up in the middle of the night (circa 3am) and rang in at 134. I was pretty psyched and even in my sleepiness, I gave myself a tiny half-unit bolus so I would wake up below 100 on Sunday morning.

But no, that was not to be.

I got to sleep in a little on Sunday morning (which was nice), but woke up at 285(!!!!!) at 9:15am. WTF? Not a nice way to start a day.

And the day sucked from there on out, really.

Had a steep decent from there down to 72 mg/dl by 1pm, hung in the mid-100s through the late afternoon (which isn't really all that bad), but then topped out at 489 at the end of the day.

Here it is in all its roller-coaster glory.

We were on our way out to dinner at a friends place at 6:30pm and I ate a granola bar and only bolused for half of it because I knew we wouldn't be eating for some time. This makes no sense. This is old-school diabetes therapy thinking. Old habits are hard to break sometimes, though.

When I snuck off to test my blood sugar before the meal, I was pretty surprised by the 346 reading. I chalked it up to the half-ass bolus for the granola bar (though that really couldn't have caused it, and I should have been suspicious then) and gave a boatload of insulin to correct and account for the (now) small dinner I was going to eat. We ordered out Indian food, and I ate nothing but meat basically, and the smallest piece of Naan. Oh and I drank a beer and a half. After dinner, creme brulée, cookies, some sort of chocolate/pecan tart, AND pumpkin cheesecake was served. I ate none of it. I sipped my beer and as everyone else was eating their desserts, I started to develop an upset stomach.

I thought that maybe one of the mussels I'd eaten wasn't quite right. By the time we were walking out to the car, I tested again, and my blood sugar basically didn't budge: 352. I was pretty nauseous and asked Meg to drive home. When we got home, I thought I was going to be sick. After pacing around and drinking a little water, my stomach calmed down. I started to get ready for bed and tested my blood sugar again.

4-effin-89.

Not cool.

Then it was like the missing piece to a puzzle finally fell into place:

"Something is wrong!"
"Check out your site, Kevin!"

I inspected my site, and sure enough: the little blue arrows were not lined up, and furthermore, I could see that the cannula was full of blood. These were such rookie mistakes. I should have been on this at the first reading over 300. I was so disappointed with myself. I wanted to at least have eaten some of that pumpkin cheesecake to end up in the stratosphere like this!

I tested for ketones (oddly there were none), I switched out the site, took (another) boatload of insulin, and finally fell asleep when I was "all the way down" at 437. I woke up the next morning at 196 -- not as bad as Sunday morning, but still a pretty shitty way to start the week.

I hate this so much.

I'm trying so hard, being so damned disciplined, and then this sneaks up on me and pulls the rug out from under my efforts. I feel like such a whiner, but I'm going to say it anyway: It's just not fair.

I actually have a second bad day of news to share, but I've yammered on long enough -- tune in for more bad news tomorrow!!