It suddenly made perfect sense.
Well, if not perfect sense, it was at least a bit more understandable.
My frustration with wacky blood sugars and unsteady diabetes management had built to a head and I was on the verge of committing to some basal rate testing to straighten it out. I felt very unsure of myself, with ratios and settings that just didn’t seem to work anymore! What the heck was going on?!!
With each and every high or low blood sugar my confidence was being sucked right out of me.
The only time/place that I felt any semblance (which means “an erroneous mental representation”) of control was during basketball. Which in its own strange way didn’t make any sense either! See, I recently learned that the “sweetspot” for athletes with type 1 diabetes during exercise is around 150 mg/dl. Previously my target had been closer to 100 mg/dl. Guess where my blood sugar was during basketball for the past few weeks? Yup, right there at around 150 mg/dl. I hadn’t made any adjustments or changes, I just decided where I wanted to be, and it was done! Dumb luck as it turned out (but it felt awesome).
The light bulb “popped” on at exactly 6:30 PM one night, when my 6:30 AM site change pump alert went off…
Dammit! This is not the first time I’ve done this. I had the time on my pump set exactly 12 hours off. AM/PM, Day/Night, High Basals/Low Basals. No wonder my blood sugars had been all goofy.
I tried to think back to the last time I was messing with my pump clock. Business trip, September 30th, flying back home through a time zone or two.
So what if it took me 15+ days and nights to figure it out? If I was paying any kind of attention to a number of clues (wonky BG’s, lack of alerts) I might have noticed sooner. Instead I just wrote off all the weirdness to diabetes not following the rules and a whole bunch of coincidences (there’s no such thing).
So now I’m doing better, except that I need to tweak my basketball stuff. I have learned (again) to check the simple stuff first. Here I was all ready to do some basal rate testing (read “Pain In The Arse”), when all I had to do was fix the clock.
Insulin pumps need to be like cell phones where it fixes your clock automatically. I REALLY need to do the 24 hour basal testing thing again to do some tweaking… I’m just PROCRASTINATING. =)
Well, you could always use the 24 hour clock, right?
Okay, I don’t, either.
Scott,
The way I see it…. finding an explanation for crazy diabetes is the best. Sure, it was a silly little timing error, but what the heck..it made sense once you figured it out! 🙂
Don’t feel bad Scott. Riley had another high, high day at school yesterday. I chalked it up to diabetes just being it’s stupid self again. That is until this morning when I learned that the stupid one was me. Riley has two very distinct basal patterns. One for weekends and one for weekdays. The weekday one is supposed to go along with the school day. Well, I realized this morning that I had not changed his basal pattern and he was still on the weekend pattern. So, that explains why he was so high at school yesterday. It wasn’t diabetes as much as it was me. I’m trying not to beat myself up over it. I know mistakes happen, but when it affects my kid it kills me.
I’m glad you figured out what was going on. Here’s to good sugar days ahead.
Some pumps can set their time to match the computer you link to, and your computer can get it’s time over the internet, so that it is always correct.
Oh my God, Scott… I did this last summer. And it took going out with a bunch of fellow DOCers for a ballgame for me to realize that three weeks worth of wonky bloodsugars after getting a new pump were caused by my AM/PM setting error…. Ugh! Glad you figured it out though. 🙂
Oops!
I’ve never done that but I have done some crazy stuff.
I wonder if that is why some people have their pumps on 24 hour time. I could never do that because I use it as my watch and I am not that good at math! 😉
You’d think they’d have pumps set to the atomic clock, (with GPS to determine if you’d crossed time zones) … sometimes this stupid stuff is just plain annoying … why so much customization for the patient to be responsible for? After all, we (or our insurance companies) are paying $7,000, the least they could do is make this stuff a no-brainer!