“I heard you”, Mr T said.
“What did you hear?” I asked.
“I heard you being sick again.
Why were you sick?”
This morning I’d woken up feeling
nauseous. I got out of bed, leaving Mr T asleep, and pottered around the house,
tidying and chatting away to the degus. I took an anti-sickness tablet and made
myself some ginger tea – someone had suggested drinking it when nausea sets in.
Not long after the kettle had boiled I was in the bathroom bringing up last
night’s dinner. I had eaten 12 hours ago yet there it was, clearly it had been
sitting in my stomach overnight, not heading anywhere. I instantly felt better
after emptying my stomach, brushed my teeth and went back to my ginger tea. It was a
relief to have the undigested food out of me and the nausea settled quickly, but it wasn't healthy, I knew that, I worried about the damage that was being done after years of vomiting on and off.
I
checked the screen on my insulin pump and looked back over the CGM (continuous
glucose monitoring) trace for the past 12 hours. I could see that my pump had
suspended my insulin around 45 minutes after I had bolused for my evening meal –
the pump does this when the CGM picks up that I’m heading for a hypo. This must
have been because the insulin started working before the food had digested.
Throughout the night I could see that my glucose levels were unusually flat, with
no post meal rise at all. This wasn’t surprising now that I know my food didn’t
really leave my stomach (or the majority of it anyway).
This, compared with other days,
has been a relatively easy day. For the past few weeks since I’ve had the CGM
and been able to see exactly what my glucose is doing, I’ve become increasingly
frustrated and scared when seeing my glucose levels. I have lows not long after
eating and highs much later, this is due to stomach emptying as described above.
I have tried to adjust to this by taking my insulin after I have eaten and spreading the delivery out over an hour or so. Sometimes this is effective, sometimes
it isn’t. My stomach will, at times, empty like it should, meaning that I
then have a high followed by a low, due to taking insulin later.
It’s almost impossible
to take insulin to cover food as I never know when or if my stomach will empty.
How can I predict that? I can’t. It’s opening up a whole new world to me and
along with that come more and more questions. How will I manage this when I don’t
have CGM in 3 weeks time? What will my a1c be like? Will I be able to have an
a1c that will be safe enough for me to have children? Will this cause my retinopathy to progress? Will this cause me to have further complications related to
uncontrolled glucose levels?
Taking it each day as it comes
seems to be the only option with something this unpredictable. I’ve started
medication as prescribed and I’m self-managing as best I can from information I
have found on the internet. I had always thought that I quite liked spontaneity,
not planning ahead and seeing what the future brings. One thing I have learnt
over the last three weeks is that when it comes to my health, this is the
opposite of what I want. It’s frightening, it’s depressing and it’s still
something that comes as a huge regret.
Take care of your diabetes as much as you can, and hopefully it will take care of you.
Ninjabetic x
I'm not just saying that because I'm trialling it - but I really rate it (yes rate, not hate) and after a week of using it I would be more than happy to continue using it in place of my regular insulin pump. As a stand-alone pump (forget the CGM and SmartGuard for now), it's bloody impressive! I've never used a Medtronic product before so I have no idea how similar it is to other pumps they have, but personally I think it has set the standard in terms of what's on the market at the moment.
A bolus wizard basically calculates the amount of insulin you need to take for a meal (or a correction dose) depending on your blood glucose levels, the carbohydrate content of your food (if applicable) and other factors such as exercise or illness. Now... my current BG meter has a bolus wizard which does all of this and then sends (via Bluetooth) the amount of insulin I need to my pump which then delivers it, meaning I don't need to fish around in my bra or pockets to find my pump and do this manually.