When you're an insulin dependent diabetic, your life revolves around basic arithmetic. Blood sugar levels are carefully (or sometimes not so carefully) monitored, you know to take x amount of long acting insulin (in my case, 80 units) in the morning to get you through the day on a relatively even keel, and then you take x units of short acting insulin with each meal, based on how many carbs you're eating - x being (again, in my case) generally around 70 units, but that can go up or down based on what your base blood sugar is when you check it. It's basic algebra, boring - but it keeps me alive.
But then again... last night, about 2 in the morning, Moose insisted I wake up - whining, nudging, all the usual signals, because I was going low blood sugar - sweating, shaking, dizzy... when I checked, my blood sugar was 68. (Normal for most people is between 80 and 120 - I tend to run a little higher than that, so when I hit below 70, I need to adjust *now*.) I got up, drank my emergency apple juice (that's about 15 carbs) and had some popcorn (about another 30 carbs worth) and waited a bit until I was back up to 135. I then ate a grilled chicken thigh (emergency protein to keep me going once the immediate carb load wore off) and went back to bed. So, that's 45 carbohydrates - no insulin, but 45 carbs.
So how the hell is it that I woke up this morning to a blood sugar level of 295? I've always had a strong dawn phenomenon - where my system releases some sugar first thing when I wake up. Most people have it a little bit - I've got it in spades. Anyway, to adjust for that, I'm supposed to take 40 units of long acting insulin to get me through the night - which is probably what caused the low that hit me, but it shouldn't be pumping in twice the sugar that anyone needs in their system. How am I supposed to adjust for this? There is no algebraic formula that's going to work here. Oh, well... apparently, my endocrine system has been studying trigonometry, deciding that algebra is for wimps.
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