Someone should have taken a picture: my dad and I checking our sugar roughly two hours after we ate Thanksgiving. He: 114. Me: 86.
"You must have overestimated your insulin," Mom said.
"Yes, but I'll spike later," I said.
Sure enough, an hour later I was 206. Would have been nice to have had a CGMS on my side for Thanksgiving. Between the smooth mashed potatoes, stuffing, pumpkin pie and pumpkin cheesecake Thursday was not only a carb fest but a complex-carb fest leaving me hanging out in the upper 200s for most of the Thanksgiving evening no matter how much insulin I doled out (actually, I listened to my pump's recommendations in an effort to avoid a low).
Since we typically eat around 2 p.m., I am usually ready for a big snack around 8 p.m. I didn't eat anything, though, that night since I was still close to 200 around bedtime. Fortunately, the slow-digesting carbs were out of my system by morning and I woke Friday in the 80s.
This really just reinforced how much I want a CGMS. I know in the past I've said that it would be beneficial to head off lows, but I realized on Thursday how great it would be to deal with the highs that come from resistance. Or the highs that come out of nowhere. In some cases I seem to spike around three hours. So I can check my sugar after lunch or after a snack on my way home and be in an OK place and still have active insulin and an hour later when I get home I'm high and have no active insulin.
I've gotten better about checking my sugar lately. In fact, tonight I was counting the number of daily checks I've had over the last few days and I'm really proud of myself. I want to be better, though. I want to be able to react to highs or lows in the process, not deal with them after the fact.
I got fairly obsessive with checking my sugar Thursday evening. I was checking roughly every 15 to 30 minutes and making corrections based on the number and what my pump recommended. It would have been much nicer to be able to watch my numbers fluctuate on a Dexcom screen instead of worsening the calouses on my fingers.
