The other day I went on one heck of a Dexcom ride. I don’t like roller coasters because I have a serious fear of heights and have a firm belief that my death will come by way of a poisonous snake bite or a roller coaster coming off the tracks. Therefore, I avoid roller coasters. However, I cannot avoid those diabetes blood sugar roller coasters at all times. Even though I try to, they still occur.
I haven’t had one in a while, but boy did I have one on Wednesday. Tuesday night I was high, near the 300’s. By the time I woke up in the morning, I had it down to about 120-ish. Then I ate lunch and it went back up. Right before dinner I went low to about 60-ish. I was going to be eating chicken and rice, so I figured I would wait until halfway through my meal to take my insulin because I didn’t want to go super low while I was eating. That’s when the steep increase at the beginning of the coaster started. I went from a bg of 70 to a bg of 370 in under an hour. I have NEVER gone that high, that fast. In fact, I didn’t even think it was possible. If it wasn’t for testing my blood sugar to make sure my Dexcom was giving me the right numbers, I would have never believed it.
Here, I have pictures to prove it!
So, after a long night of battling to bring this crazy blood sugar down, after it hit the 425 mark, I woke up Thursday morning with a 3 hour Dexcom graph within my 70-150 range. It looked like a large slide that would probably be fun to go down in real life, but not with blood sugars. I actually don’t really feel that bad when I have these kind of roller coasters. They definitely suck because of course we want to have those Dexcom no-hitters all the time, but we can’t.
The mistake already occurred, so there was nothing I could have done about it at that time. So, the only thing to do was to do something to fix the mistake.
Moral of the story? Don’t get too down on yourself or worked up when you see that high blood sugar. Make note of what the possible causes could be, execute your plan for treating a high (bolusing, exercise, water, whatever works for you), and then test again later and repeat until you are within your comfortable range. Chalk it up as a learning point and move on.
I use the Dexcom 7 as well. My BG’s have been much better since I began using this almost two years ago. However, I sometimes over-react to a rising BG (or a falling BG).
This is what starts the roller coaster for me sometimes. I know it is kind of annoying to hear folks say that exercise is so impotant, but I have noticed that my BG is much easier to control if I have done a good bit of exercising in the past 24 hours or so. At least most of the time. One more note . . . check out a great little camp in mid MO for the education of children with Type 1 Diabetes. Just do a search for Camp Hickory Hill dot com. no spaces