Saturday, December 6, 2008

Frustrations

November is over and since NaBloPoMo is no more, I decided to go back to my couple of times per week posting. As I said before, blogging is a full time job!

Work has been crazy, family has been busy, and the Christmas season is upon us. I have almost all my Christmas shopping done, which takes away some of my stress, and overall, I am doing okay. Give me a couple of weeks and I may be singing a different tune.

I tell you all this to give you some background info. For the past week or so, my blood sugars are running okay during the day. Then, around 9 or 10 p.m., I start rising. Having not eating since 6 or 7. And they rise and rise and rise. My CGMS was waking my up 2 or 3 times a night to correct. I finally started setting a temporary basal at 110% at night, which keeps me below 200, but still in the high 100s.

There's no reason for this. No (unusual) outside stress. No sickness. No weird foods. Just unexplainable high blood sugars at night. It's gotten so bad that I've been taking almost 60 units of insulin every day. Sometimes more.

It's kind of scary. This hasn't ever happened to me before. I am giving it another week to straighten back out (maybe I'm fighting some sort of infection or something) and then we are looking at a major basal rate overhaul.

I'm hoping it's just a fluke. Or the alignment of the planets. Or something. Apparently I'm not alone in my problem right now.

Any suggestions? Any tips? Anyone else going through this too??
p.s. I found this in my bed when I pulled back the sheets.

4 comments:

Lee Ann Thill said...

Here's what I think I would do. Maybe it's lame, and someone else will have a better idea., but I think you should do basal rate testing Maybe you can pick a night to have dinner early, like at 5, so by 9 your food and active insulin are out of your system. Then let your BG do its thing without correcting just to see what it's doing overnight. That means wearing the CGM and tolerating the alarms all night or not wearing it and waking up to check every hour - both lousy options, I know :/

Although, if you temporarily set your high threshold on the CGM to like 400, the alarms would hopefully not be a problem unless you're BG would be getting that high without those corrections.

You'd obviously wake up high, but for the sake of figuring out what's going on so you can fix it, it might be worth it. If it were me, I think it would be worth it.

Also, could this be hormonal?

Scott K. Johnson said...

I hope you can get it figured out quickly. Any bets on how many test strips you'll find in the next couple weeks? Heh!

Cara said...

Lee Ann, I thought about the hormonal aspect, but the timings not what it usually is. So it's possibly a change in pattern? I don't know. Last night was somewhat better. I'm eating early tomorrow more than likely. And we'll see what happens from there.

Scott, I'm betting at least 3. :D

Karen said...

What a pain in the butt. I hate when everything seems to suddenly change for no reason. I think basal testing like Lee Ann suggested is a really good idea. I hope it all gets straightened out soon!!