Guessing games.
Do you ever have one of those days (or in this case, a whole weekend) where you feel like everything you do presents another diabetes challenge? I feel like I had it all this past weekend!
Friday night our friends hosted dinner at their house and made an awesome burrito bar. Mexican food can be chock-full of carb landmines, so I tried to minimize them by skipping the tortilla and making a “burrito plate” instead. I ended up with decent blood sugars for the night, and went in to Saturday morning sitting pretty.
Things changed quickly though when we got to a sushi-making party at another friend’s house. Sushi is already tricky on my blood sugars, since the fish breaks down very slowly, raising my BGs over time, and the rice pushes my numbers up fast. Sushi is a great time to utilize the extended bolus feature on your pump. I tried my best to keep up with Saturdays’s party, but there were just too many factors. There were appetizers and snacks I nibbled on leading up to the sushi making, and then sushi rolls of varying ingredients that came out in stages as each person made their roll. I felt like I was continually trotting between the party and my purse, hitting the bolus button every so often watching my DexCom lines become a portrait of peaks and valleys. Did I mention we also had some wine, just to truly throw off any predictability to the the day?
By the time we left that party, my blood sugar had climbed to 281mg/dL. Yuck. I bolused a big one for that, and sipped water for the next few hours, waiting for it to come back down. Which it did, all at once, around 8:30 as I sat with friends in a local bar. The Dex read 107mg/dL with an arrow pointing down, and the slight tremble I was beginning to feel told me I was lower than that already. I reached for the chip bowl and downed a few, while also sipping on a light beer. I knew I’d head back up quickly with beer and chips, but that the alcohol could also drop me low later, and since I was already too low, I decided not to bolus for anything. Turned out to be a good choice - I was chillin at 134mg/dL when I got home, but was woken up by a 59mg/dL around 5:30am. I was glad I hadn’t bolused for my snack or the beer since I headed back down anyways.
When I have days like this past weekend, I feel like I”m throwing darts at a diabetes target, hoping that they land and stick somewhere in the general vicinity of “normal range.” Food, alcohol, boluses-each item adds a layer of unpredictability that I sometimes feel like I can’t keep up with. And here I am with the best technology available and I still can’t get it right all the time! I know this weekend was a particularly tricky one to manage, but I feel so helpless when I’m chasing diabetes.
Its days like this where I simply marvel at the human body. It’s crazy to think that in a person with a functioning pancreas, all of those factors are managed automatically - as automatic as breathing. This same concept makes me amazed that we’re able to manage this manually at all, considering how complex it is.
It also makes me kind of tired to think about, because I know that weekends like this last one will continue to happen, since life isn’t always planned around good d-management. But those are the times where I try to cut myself some slack and do the best I can. Because life is too short not to make the best spicy-tuna-avocado-double-eel-inside-out-roll you’ve ever had.
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First of all, you have great friends all throwing food parties! I want an invite. Your right about how it is amazing that you can actually do the work for part of your body, think if you had to manually control your heart by speeding it up and slowing it down!! It sounds like you are doing a great job on your D care, but the main thing about that is that you do actually care. Without any care towards D feels like hey just shoot me now kinda thing…I say if you keep on caring about how you feel then you have given D a swift kick in the ass!