Today has been one of those rare days where (so far, fingers crossed!) my blood sugars have been mostly within range all day. By range I mean the window of safety between 4.0 and 7.0 mmol/L. When I woke up my reading was 7.6 and I always find this has a profound effect on how my day starts. Recently I have been waking up with BG levels in the high teens and twenties. Physically this makes me feel unwell, I liken the symptoms to that of a hangover: headachey, thirsty, exhausted. But it also has an effect on my attitude towards my day. I feel miserable when my blood sugars are that high and, until I get into work at least, I find it very difficult to focus on anything else. Luckily, when I get to school and work takes over it gets pushed to the back of my mind.
But today I began the day at a decent 7.6. My target for today was to begin the weaning process from my snazzy do-all mmol/L meter to my Korean mg/dL meter. This has meant that for most of the day I have done two blood tests every time I wanted a reading. I have sore finger tips – and I’m pretty sure I punctured the same hole twice on a couple of occasions, not a pleasant experience – and I don’t really feel any closer to knowing but I need to be realistic. Rome wasn’t built in a day! By break time I was 6.6 and before lunch I was 4.3. Pretty perfect really.
I have been finding the diet here quite hard to get used to. In England I ate ‘brown’ everything. I have managed to find brown rice and pasta which we have at home but the school dinners rely heavily on ‘white’ carbs, as do all restaurants. I was finding that I felt bloated and horrible after eating all the white stuff so I decided at the end of last week to try to skip the carbohydrates at lunchtimes. Whether or not type-1 diabetics should eat low-carb meals is a contentious issue and I have had many a debate on the pros and cons on various online forums. However I have been finding that it’s definitely got its positives, so I’m trying it out. Brown bread is something I am really missing; Korean bread is very white and very sweet. I miss the good old English granary!
At the end of the school day my BG levels were 6 still. I got the bus home and went to E-Mart to buy some food for lunch tomorrow (I am going on the Grade 5 camp – always an interesting blood sugar event!) and on the way home I started getting hypo warning signs. A hypo is when your BG levels fall below the safe limits. Apparently, from the outside, a person experiencing a hypo acts drunk. When I am experiencing one myself I don’t feel drunk but I have seen another diabetic have a hypo and I found it very interesting! It was like watching myself and I couldn’t help but have a little giggle to myself! Again there are symptoms associated with a hypo. There are the physical reactions: sweating, shaking, hunger, blurring eyesight and a general feeling of confusion. Other feelings that go with it can vary. If I am reading I find I will have to read and re-read a line over and over and it just doesn’t make sense. Or sometimes I feel like I’m walking through mud and everything around me is moving on a fast forward button. And sometimes my brain thinks about exercise but it feels like a foreign concept; it just can’t compute the idea of running! Funny things hypoes… So when I got home I tested my BG and it was 4.3, just on the verge of a hypo. At this point I got a little frustrated; I had toyed with the idea of eating something before I left school but decided against it. Also, I was planning on going to the gym, something I won’t do following a hypo.
The reason for a dip on blood sugars at this time of day is another thing to try and work out. As well as being a balancing act between food and insulin, diabetes also requires a balance of sorts between types of insulin. Every day I inject two different types of insulin: Levemir, a long-acting basal insulin and Novorapis, a short-acting bolus insulin. The job of the basal is to create a platform for the bolus, the idea being that if you don’t eat, or inject, your BG levels stay stable. The job of the bolus is to counteract food, it is this insulin I have to calculate the doses for with my meals. Bolus insulin has a profile of about 4 hours, so a hypo within 4 hours of taking a dose is normally due to a miscalculation of either food or insulin dose, while a hypo more than 4 hours after a meal is usually down the to the basal dose not being right. So bearing in mind that today I ate and injected around 12:45 and I hypoed around 5:00pm it is hard to tell which insulin is responsible! I will need to keep a record over the next few days and see if any patterns occur: the reason for this blog! But then the basal dose in itself is a whole other ball game: it is the first port of call and the thing I NEVER get right. In order to check the dosage over night , I need to wake up at 3 am to check the stability of my levels comparing the bed time level with the waking one. During the day I need to fast over a meal time and test my blood sugars every hour to check how stable they are. Neither one of these are events to look forward to, especially on a work day/night!
I think enough for today. I will be interested to see what happens over the next few days, being away with the children.
And thanks for all the positive comments. Knowing people have read what I’ve written so far gives me a bit more motivation to keep writing more!
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