So, Day One and Day Two out of the way. On to Day Three of my experiment, but first, an analysis.
Think of all this terrifying looking math like you might a first-person shooter game. I've found thinking of this
like a game is the surest coping mechanism.
You're the shooter, you have a targeted goal, laws to follow, certain weapons and tools
to help you, and some shifty little characters (namely glucose and insulin) that are
sometimes friendly, sometimes dangerous. Here are the parameters:
Target blood sugar is 130mg of glucose (milligrams of sugar) per dL (deciliter) of blood (teeny tiny amounts of blood).
Basal Rates (the steady "drip" of insulin throughout the day measured in percentage of a unit [U]):
3pm-4am .50U
4am-3pm- .55U
Insulin:Carb Ratio (how much insulin I get for every gram of carbs I eat):
12am-1230pm- 1U of insulin per 11g carbs
1230pm-4pm- 1U of insulin per 9g carbs
4pm-12am- 1U of insulin 8g carbs
Correction Factor (mg/dL reduction per U)
To get there, I get 1U of insulin for every 36 mg/dL over 130 mg/dL I go.
12am-12am (doesn't vary) 36 mg/dL:1U
My game here has yielded some interesting results. On Day One, I started out high at 281mg/dL, then had fabulous sugars most of the rest of the day. Around dinner they started to creep up, to 144mg/dL, then 224mg/dL, and then crashing from 157mg/dL to 31mg/dL. And a lot of frenzied rationalization ensued.
Yesterday, Day Two, was almost exactly the opposite in terms of results. My activities stayed the same (which is to say, next to nothing, unless you count reading Vonnegut's biography as strenuous), but the sugars were on some downward spiral. 113mg/dL to 251mg/dL, then 85, 43, 76, 59, 41, 38, and so I could finally get some rest, we ended the night with 113mg/dL.
While I'm tempted to let my frustrations get the best of me and call the whole game off, I have to keep in mind that it takes three days to establish a data set and determine what the trends may be. So whatever the results are for today will be the key to it all, I believe.
