Tuesday, May 5, 2009

I don't want to play anymore...

After a real good week, Adele has started to become more and more sensitive to insulin. Yesterday, she had really good blood glucose values, but needed to eat extra carbs in between meals / snacks to avoid going low. I hate force-feeding her like this.

Because of this increased insulin sensitivity, I backed off Adele's insulin a bit today to avoid the extra snacks required yesterday. This seemed to be working very good until around supper. Her sugar was 3.7 before supper (anything below 4.0 is considered low). I need to back off her insulin even more at her afternoon snack tomorrow and it should fix it. As I was eating a late supper around 7 pm, Adele started eating from my plate with her bare hands. I told her that it wasn't snack time yet, that she needed to go take a shower and would eat afterwards... unless she felt low. She said she didn't feel low but was just very, very hungry. Again she started eating from my plate. She was acting like a starving homeless person who was so hungry that all that mattered was to eat. Table etiquette and manners were not considered since survival was the only thing of importance in this state. This is not like Adele. She then tells us that she feels dizzy and weak, so we test her right away... 1.8 !!!

This is very, very low. We give her juice right away, Dex 4 glucose tablets, Crispy Mini rice chips, a banana. Her brain in it's glucose-deprived state was telling her that she needed to eat... right now in order to stay alive. She started shaking and had a hard time sitting down, every cell in her body was struggling to keep functioning and maintain life. So after about 45 grams of carbs, 15 minutes later her sugar had gone up to 4.4. Now, at least she's out of danger. She's still hungry. The glucose level in the blood had gone up, but the cells still didn't get enough sugar yet. After her snack, my math gives me close to 100 grams (mostly fruit and low-sugar cereal for the remaining 65 grams). Now I need to bolus (give more insulin) for part of these carbs. If not, she will surely go high. But how much insulin do I give? I no longer have confidence in the scales that I've been using after this very low blood sugar. I hope my guesstimate is good... I want to sleep tonight.

I don't want to play the Type 1 game anymore... Unfortunately that isn't an option right now.

1 comment:

Christiane said...

I feel your pain. What a lousy game we're playing. It's no fun at all.