CGM saved me from riding the roller coaster again.

Wow what an eventful morning, what time did you get up this morning?

According to my sleep deprived eyes I was up between the hours 11pm last night to 5am this morning! Why you say? Why not just take some drugs (sleeping pills) and go to sleep, well life just isn’t that simple for me and my ‘friend’ T1D.

It all started when… (cue wavy dreamy cut shot)

Last night after dinner I had to change my insulin infusion set, this requires thoroughly cleaning the injection site, so I just have a shower, as I stood there after my shower butt naked in the bathroom brushing my teeth my wife says

‘Do you have too? its very distracting’,

‘Well this is the only time I feel free because I don’t have the pump hanging off me’ so I soak it up for 5 minutes while I can.

Anyway I change the set over, this time it goes in the abdomen on the left side, OUCH it hits nerves when it goes in, holding my breath I slowly withdraw the inch needle from my stomach leaving the 13mm cannula behind, give the skin a rub because that nerve hit really hurts, everything else seems good so I go to bed to get a good nights sleep…well wasn’t I wrong.

11pm

My awesome CGM device wakes me up with an alarm telling me my blood sugars have gone high, thinking it might have been either the 10 minutes without insulin after the shower or the umm.. err.. pizza I had for dinner, I take some correction insulin to bring it back down, not long after I see it starts to go down – Great!

11:30pm

Within half an hour same deal, this time it has gone higher than before..uggggh more correction, this goes on another time until at 2am I come to the conclusion that the pain I felt on my abdomen when I inserted the infusion set the night before went too deep and was not delivering insulin to my subcutaneous layer but rather somewhere deeper that does not soak up insulin well.

2am

Stumbling around in the dark I find a new set, my injecting device and with sleepy eyes and only my phone for light, I inject another set into my butt/hip, doesn’t feel as painful so it must be good, now here is the tricky part…how do I know how much insulin my body has actually absorbed from the correction doses I took before? Remembering I am still high and need to bring it down – in comes the T1D Algebra formula at 2am. I take only a little thinking it will be enough to just bring me down enough to manage it better later on.

3:20am

I wake to the vibration and noise of the CGM device again, what now I think to myself, apparently now my blood sugars are dropping quickly, well the formula failed me..boo.

Turning my pump to suspend mode to stop insulin infusion for the next half an hour should slow it down as I am still in double digits at this point, so I stay awake for the next half an hour, still my CGM device is saying blood sugars dropping, why not get up? Do you know how cold it is at 3am??

4am

Warning alarm, my blood sugar has dropped below 4.4mmol, for crap sake. Heres where I went wrong, I was cold, tired and cranky, so I did what you shouldn’t do and had a handful of lollies then went and layed back down in bed, I was only going to do this for 15 – 20 minutes until my blood sugars had returned to normal because then of course you need to eat carbs to sustain the blood sugar.

4:15am

More alarms and now I am sweating, shaking and feel like I am going to die, obviously I am dropping so much I need more sugar, stumbling out to the kitchen, hitting my shoulders on every corner on the way, I grab the lolly container and devour what ever was left, at this point I am considering laying down on the kitchen floor so I don’t hit my head if I fall unconscious, I feel this is going south too quickly for me to handle, I try to yell out to my wife but the brain isn’t functioning and nothing comes out.

Panic is setting in…I sit on the floor with my back against the kitchen cupboard, heart beating out of my chest, shaking like crazy and breathing rapidly.

4.57am

The feeling of impending doom is slowly passing, the CGM still says I am low and blood test confirms 4.0mmol, I eat a 3 handfuls of cashew nuts (which equals to about 20g of carbohydrates) as these are low GI and back off to bed I go for a few hours sleep. Thanks god thats over.

6am

CGM – Blood sugars high and rising alarm, FFS!!! heres the roller coaster again, more correction but only a little this time and by 6:30 its looking better, at this point the house is awake and noise is all around anyway, as I lay there trying to get what ever rest I can before I get up I think about how I am going to get through the day with my energy drained…COFFEE!!!!!

7am

I get up like a zombie and make myself a full strength coffee, sitting there at the breakfast table listing to the peanut butter fables the kids are telling about their exciting lives (the peanut butter came from my middle child, one day she told a massive story that went for probably 5 minutes and in the end it was all about eating a peanut butter sandwich, so know when the kids start blabbing on we say “is this a peanut butter sandwich story??), I get another alarm from  the CGM, rapid decent in blood sugar…AGAIN!!!!!

In goes a ripe banana, containing around 30g of carbohydrate, no insulin taken for it and around 20 minutes , my blood sugar decent slows right down and goes normal..YAY!! CGM saved me from riding the roller coaster again, thanks you are my new best friend!

As for the rest of the day, who know what could happen…

Marvel presents: The Human Pincushion

People often ask me, “…how often do you test your blood sugar?”, I usually answer “around 4 or 5 times a day”, well according to my finger tips, its a lot more than that.

Realistically its between 8 and 10 times a day, that doesn’t include the blanks I fire every now and then. For you gutter minded people, that’s when you prick your finger and you only get half the 5ml of blood you need for a test to work, so you have to ‘stab’ again and sometimes again.

So to give you an idea of when I am prompted to test, these are the things I think of;

– Going to do exercise in an hour – TEST!

– Ready to do exercise – TEST!

– About to drive a motor vehicle – TEST!

– Feeling a bit odd – TEST!

– Wake up – TEST!

– Going to bed, before I brush my teeth…so many times I have brushed my teeth then tested and its low, urrgg eat sugar then brush my teeth again. If you have ever eating lollies after brushing its like having sour milk…oh yeah – TEST!

– Getting ready to eat a meal – TEST!

– Sick with cold/flu/gastro etc (when your sick, your blood sugar goes crazy!)- TEST! TEST! TEST! TEST! TEST! TEST!

You get the picture, if not check out my finger tips…

It is a horrible thing to do, especially when you hit a sensitive spot cause that sharp pain lasts for days and you can guarantee you wont be using it again for a while.

Last year I started using a new technology called Continuous Glucose Monitoring or CGM, the one I used was called Dexcom from AMSL, fantastic tech! This technology monitors your glucose every 5 minutes via a little platinum sensor strip injected under your skin (yep something else to inject!), this is attached to a transmitter which transmits to a little device that looks like a smart phone, only this smart phone shows you real time glucose levels as well as trends…it even detects when you are going low or high and gives you an alarm to warn you before it happens.

I got this technology to help track glucose levels during exercise, great for analysing how exercise and the food/liquid you consume affects it, best thing is you upload it to the dexcom website to view and analyze deeper.

So why am I telling you this? Well since going on Paleo, I have seen weird things happen with my blood glucose, even when no carbs are eaten, so in order to better control my life I have decided to invest in the technology again and when I say invest, its not cheap but the control you get from this technology is amazing, not only that but it has saved me from going into severe low blood sugars a few times and that is worth its weight in gold (then again it doesn’t weigh much).

If anyone has used CGM before and didnt like it because of the short length of time they could use it before it falls off or fails, then you should try Dexcom, its only approved for 7 days use per sensor, however with proper care and hygiene I managed to keep it on for 52 days!

Wish me luck!

Follow me on twitter: @trainingt1d