Seriously, are all recliners blue?

Rich and I took my car home from the office so we could get dinner on the way home. While waiting at a stoplight near the house, Rich looked out the window and said, "You need a chair? I know that's kinda your thing." On the curb was another blue recliner sitting out for the trash. And in the passenger seat was my husband with a huge grin, so pleased with himself. I reminded him that we were in the Mini and the chair wouldn't fit. Besides we still have the first blue recliner in the laundry room for Ms. Kitty's lounging needs.

But I did consider it for just a moment. I think we need to take another way home and stay inside on the night before trash day. There's too much tempting stuff on people's garbage for me.

Diabetes math 101

It's just one day, but it feels really good. Even that slight dip into 60 wasn't the end of the world and I really did fix it with just 17 grams of carbs (a fruit roll up and five jelly beans). Now we'll see if I can keep this up.

One major factor in my success today was everything I ate was pre-packaged or prepared with known carbohydrate amounts. And for the most part, I avoided items with a lot of carbs in them. But what if I had ordered a sandwich at a deli?

The breads in the picture above range from 10-20g carbs per slice. To make a sandwich, one generally needs two slices of bread, so my sandwich would have between 20-40g of carbs. I take one unit of insulin for every 11 grams of carbs. So I would take somewhere between 1.8 to 3.6 units of insulin with my insulin pump (try THAT with a syringe, I dare ya).

If I start out with a blood sugar of 85 and take too little, my sugar could be 195 after lunch. Likewise, if I take way too much, I will be at 40 before I've gotten back from the restaurant. Knowing that a blood sugar of 195 is bad but I can function and "fix it later" while a blood sugar of 40 has me in tears and unable to drive myself anywhere, which one should I choose?

Now, quick, do these calculations while at the table, talking to your friends and not knowing if this will be the best sandwich you've ever eaten or something better for your next roofing project. What if you can't finish the sandwich because you get called away? What if you finish the sandwich and you're still hungry but you don't know if you took enough insulin or too much?

I'm not trying to start a pity party. I just want to try to explain the incredible amount of vigilance, memory for numbers, tenacity, patience and straight up math involved in accurately maintaining this disease. I did Everything Right and had great blood sugars today. But that was one day. Everyone reading this could do what I did today. It's not rocket science. But can you do it for a week? How about a month? How about for 23 and a half years? Today is my 8613th day as a Type 1 diabetic.

While each day is a mathematical challenge, diabetes is certainly not the primary focus of my life. Lots of other things have happened in the last 8613 days besides all those blood sugar readings. I learned to ride a bike. I went to prom. I passed AP calculus and went to college. I married and divorced and married again. I've owned and driven close to a dozen cars. Today was good and Sunday was really not good and Saturday was kinda in the middle. But that's really how life is in many ways. You just have to take it one day at a time.

Here's to day number 8614.

I knew AP calculus would come in handy one day

Yesterday was not such a great day for my blood sugars. It started at 6:30 when I woke up feeling off and my blood sugar was 353. It took all morning to wrestle it down to something reasonable and next thing I knew it was 53. All that started Friday night when my sugar plummeted to 41 and I had a bit of a freak out about it. The time for 15 carbs and waiting 15 minutes was over and it became the time for sobbing into a bowl of Frosted Flakes with the spoon shaking in my hand. Good times. Of course, the best way to prevent the roller coaster of blood sugars is to never get on it in the first place. Easier said than done, though. Over the last couple of months I've just had a hard time keeping up. Even though my average blood sugar was around 140, the actual values were nowhere near that. If the standard deviation is as much as the mean value, that's not good. It has literally been the 30 or 300 game (which is not a fun game, actually).

Having to fax over my test results to try to get my CGM sensors covered by insurance really brought home how upset I was about the numbers themselves. And while the CGM sensor will sound an alarm when my sugars get "out of range", it can only help if I'm not pushing the envelope by screwing up the math for what I eat. So I broke out a new log book, covered it in snowman stickers for the season and am going to try tracking things a lot tighter over the next month. Hopefully this will give me some better insight while I wait to hear back if my CGM sensors will be covered. So far I've checked my blood 10 times today and 13 times yesterday. But at least today I managed to keep the range between 58 and 155.

I'm back to using jelly beans to tweak my sugars. Each jelly bean is about one gram of carbs so I can literally count out the number of beans I need to get me from a shaky 60 up to a stable 80. It's still not an exact science but it sure beats the "Fuck it! I'm chugging Coke until I can see the future!" method that I usually employ once I go below 60.

And while it's tedious working my way across this tightrope, it's a lot less nauseating than the trapeze act I've been swinging through lately.