Thursday, January 31, 2013

Test-Bolus-Eat-Wait-Repeat

So, before I get started, I would like to get my excuse-making out of the way. With the best of intentions, I had planned to blog once a week or so, but as irony would have it, my diabetes got so out of whack that there hasn't been much time for anything besides day to day activities and total panic.

But, in trying to turn that panic into something productive, I will pick up here with my exciting weekend plans.

At my last visit to the endocrinologist, I came in at an impressive 7.0 Ha1c reading, the best I've ever achieved. This puts my average blood sugar around 150 mg/dL; not low enough to make my husband feel relieved, but enough to bring my anxiety down to a low-grade ridiculous. However, starting on November 27, things went from ok to terrible. I managed to reach a new low, at 28 mg/dL during a sales meeting, in which I found myself slumped over an office chair for almost an hour while my friends and co-workers tried to bring me back to the land of the living. I couldn't be more thankful for that. Ever since then, I've noticed my sugars yo-yo pattern become more and more extreme.

This has become extremely stressful. Anxiety about unstable blood sugars is bad, and anxiety about unstable blood sugars accompanied by obsessive-compulsive disorder reaches a whole new level of hysteria. In an effort to try and regain some control, I reverted back to a lot of the tendencies I've had some success in suppressing: hair splitting and pulling, intrusive thoughts, compulsive organizing. Like any good obsessive-compulsive, I could see the crazy for what it is, and decided to make an early trip to the endocrinologist. Really, there are only so many times you can review closed customer files for phantom updates before I have some awkward explaining to do.

Basically what I was directed to do was a diabetic reset. My pump's settings were put back to a baseline, and I was instructed to stay in as stable an environment as possible and monitor continuously to find the trends and, therefore, the problems. Not the "Erica had a bad day so now her sugar is 248" or the "Erica had a blueberry muffin and couldn't find the exact carb calculation for that particular muffin, so now her sugar is 53" kind of a problem.

So here I am, at home for the next three days, recording all my food, insulin, stress, and activity. I feel very inert, but maybe that's what I need to keep me from being unstable, as fun as that hysteria is.

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