Zoned out.
This week, my work travels took me to beautiful (but dark) Alaska for three days. Traveling in Alaska in the winter is enough wreak havoc on your circadian rhythms in and of itself. The sun doesn’t come up until 9:00 am or so, and then it sets again at 4:30pm. When the alarm goes off at a leisurely 7am (sleeping in for me these days), your immediate reaction is “holy hell why is the alarm going off in the middle of the night!?”
Hint: It’s not. You have to got to work. Sorry.
As if the extra short days didn’t mess with me enough, there’s a one hour time change to deal with as well. It’s an hour behind the West Coast, and being that I was there for work and on other people’s schedules, I immediately updated my watch and all my appointments in my Outlook calendar…but somehow neglected my pump completely. Yes, it was the third (and final) day of the trip before I realized that all of my settings would be an hour ahead. An hour isn’t always a big deal, but when you consider the fact that my basal rates change five times throughout the day to accommodate my divergent insulin needs, an hour matters. My basals change at exactly 4:30am so I don’t get low at 5:30am - it’s a precise and targeted adjustment. That hour matters but I hadn’t taken it into account.
BGs were challenging on this trip for other reasons (lots of sitting on the 3.5 hour flight over there, sitting in the car trying to follow Siri’s directions to appointments, lots of big meals with customers with so much delicious seafood that was new to bolus for - all the usual work issues), but I am sure they were affected also by everything being off by an hour.
Or were they? The fact that I totally spaced and didn’t adjust anything got me thinking: what are the rules for changing your basals and time zones? Do you guys always change them, even for a quick trip and even if the time change is only one hour? Or do you allow a few days in some zones with no adjustments if the trip is already going to be a nutty one and you won’t be adjusting fully to the time anyways?
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I usually change them on the flight over and then wait for my circadian rhythms to catch up. The other thing is I use my pump as a watch so it needs to be correct.