Lost Sleep

The thing I hate more than anything is loosing sleep. I'm a sleeper. I always have been. I took naps way longer than most kids and I had to be dragged out of bed most mornings.

I like to get my 8 hours plus. I can also sleep almost anywhere.

Put me in a car? I'm asleep in 10 minutes or so. A plane? I'm usually asleep before they get to drink orders.

This is not unusual for me. The only time I ever worried about sleep was when I was not making it through the day at work, without going to my car to take a nap. While that's another story, it lead to my Celiac diagnosis, and I'm back to just regularly sleeping a lot.

Diabetes is a sleep stealer. A full on stealer of sleep. With current diabetes technology, the wonderful world of Constant Glucose Monitoring, we are give the security of closer diabetes monitoring. We are given the benefits of knowing what out blood sugar is all of the time. It is a beautiful and wonderful technology, but it also has it's downsides.

There are alarms. All the time. You're too high, you're too low. You're rising quickly or falling quickly. Your sensor has lost communication with your device. During the day, these are great. You hear it, you give a quick adjustment and hopefully fall back into your range again. During the night, these alarms can be lifesaving. An alarm that wakes me from a low, could potentially save me from hospitalization or even death.

But these alarms, when they wake me at night, also keep me awake. Sometimes they go off multiple times during the night, making sleep broken and interrupted. Other times, it wakes me and I can't go back to sleep. This is what has been happening more often lately.

I miss sleep. I miss uninterrupted sleep. I miss it so much. It makes my days hard sometimes. It makes my nights restless. Diabetes is a sleep stealer.

My options are limited. I could turn off my sensor at night, but lose the safety of knowing if I drop too low or go too high. It's something that I've considered. But I'm not sure I'm ready to do this for now.

Thankfully, technology is improving. There are options out there to help regulate your blood sugar levels, without as much human decision making.  But until I get that technology, uninterrupted sleep is a nice idea, but not always possible.