Major Overhaul

On Saturday I decided to make some serious changes to my basal rates. I did it because I feel like I am still fighting highs all the time. I spike after breakfast and around 4 in the afternoon. I feel like I'm chasing highs on a regular basis and I haven't been having lows very often. Not that no lows is a bad thing....it's just that I think I'd be having more if my blood sugars were more stabilized around the levels that I want them to be.

I was hesitant to make changes at first, but I downloaded all of my pump data into Carelink and that was what prompted me to make some changes. Basically, for a while, I am going to be playing trial and error. If I can't get something figured out in the next couple of weeks, I am going to be contacting my doctor to see what changes she would suggest. I have an appointment with my nurse practitioner and my nutritionist in late August, but I don't really want to wait until then to get things back where I think they should be.

This just goes to show you what an individual disease diabetes is. With most illnesses, doctors make all the calls. What medicine to give, and when. How to change dosages and times. But with those of us who live with diabetes everyday, sometimes a call to our doctor isn't something that can be done for a change. Sometimes it a decision that we make based on the data that we have. And it's good data. It's all the same data that a doctor would have. And since we are living it every day, we can sometimes catch things that a doctor or CDE might not catch. Like that high might be because we ate something we didn't give the proper insulin for. Or that low that came because we were outside in the heat for an extended period of time. Or that spike that we see happening all the time because we deal with it everyday.

I'm not a scientist, or a doctor. I'm not even that great at math. But using the data I have, I turn into a doctor and a statistician. I evaluate, and observe, and gather more data. And then I make decisions. Maybe they'll be the right ones. Maybe not. But just like anything else, we have to tweak those numbers to get the end result that we want.

So, starting today, we'll see what happens. I'll be packing around extra juice boxes, just in case. And I might even be glad to see a low (as long as it's not a bad one, of course).