Life with the Dex
So now that I'm a veteran of this system - almost a week! - I figured I'd tell you a bit about living with it, instead of my various pathetic attempts to impress the world with my supposedly fabulous instinctive grasp of the thing.
Hey, self-promotion is all the rage these days.
Oh, and note I'm calling it "the thing". There is reason for that, because it has by now taken a life of its, and it is controlling me, guiding my thoughts, running my life...
What would you expect from something that has such a huge say on how I manage my diabetes anyway?
I think I mentioned it before, but the best way I have to describe the thing's profound
impact is this:
It allows me to make many small accurate corrections instead of few big less accurate ones.
As any type I who is also brittle and using short-acting insulin (that is, me) will tell you, our life is this constant diabetes management hyper-course. Thing is, because you could never really tell where your blood sugars were headed unless they were headed there at a pretty sharp clip, you'd develop these ideas about how your body does things. With me, and my chronic fear of hypos (not unusual amongst our tribe), it was always the fear of going under 100. Because I can easily drop 50 mg/dl in 15 minutes, and would do so regularly. So 100 was always a scary number, because it meant 50 was just around the corner, and 50 ain't good.
So if I found myself at, say, 100 an hour after lunch, I'd immediately correct up, no matter what. Now, sometimes that would work well, and I'd catch a hypo before it happened. But sometimes it would be too late, and I'd already hypoed and rebounded and hadn't noticed it, meaning my correction was simply adding to an already rising trend, resulting in a nice, fat 400 on my meter an hour later. And sometimes it would be an unnecessary reaction, because I in fact got the ideal combination of bolus and food, making it so I managed to flatten my post-meal blood sugars due to the combination of glycemic indexes and amount of insulin taken at just the perfect time. It does happen. Thing is, when you hit this ideal the last thing you want is mess with it, and my "correction" would inevitably mess with it.
In other words, I lived in constant fear. Fear of the unnoticed, unmitigated hypo that would send me plummeting to the floor in the middle of a meeting, or make me completely incoherent in front of a client, or what have you. The same would happen after dinner, when the fears intensified, because I was going to be asleep soon.
In retrospect, it's practically a miracle that I had managed to keep my A1C's down around 7% for so many years. I did it by pricking my fingers 15+ times per day, trying to make more and smaller corrections rather than big ones, but doing quite a poor job at it because, well, I could never test as frequently as I needed to all the time. It's just not practical.
And then came the thing.
It's amazing what that little trend graph does. I can look at it and at a glance know where I stand, and figure out where I will be in 10, 20, 30 minutes. Extrapolating is easy as pie. There is no guesswork involved; it's all visual, it's all right there.
And the immediate result? I'm not afraid of 100 anymore. I'm not afraid of 90, or 80, or even 70 for that matter. Case in point: yesterday night before going to sleep I was dropping, and feeling it. Before the thing, I'd have tested myself at some point to see I was around 100. I would then react severely, stuffing myself with a bunch of quickly digestible carbs, test again 30 minutes later and see myself at somewhere in the 160-200 range, and say "OK, great, no hypo tonight" and go to sleep. I'd sometimes wake up high anyway, not sure what happened along the way.
Not now, though. This time I had data, real data. First of all, I was dropping slowly, at a constant rate of about 3.5 mg/dl per 5 minutes. That meant I had time to let the trend establish, because I was only dropping about 42 mg/dl per hour, enough time to react calmly. So I ate something small, and waited. I went down to 90, then 80, then 70, which is when I drank some OJ and ate a bit of honey. As expected, the honey and OJ "caught" about 15 minutes later, just as I hit 60, raised me to 130 or so, and kept me there. Never triggered the liver to release glucagon, never went too high, never over-reacted.
Woke up in the 150's after a nice stable night. Beautiful.
This keeps happening; my ability to make these smaller, measured fixes "just in time" is almost beyond belief. The calming effect this has is also a benefit, even if not easily quantifiable. And it sure keeps me flatter through the day because I can anticipate as well as react better.
The downside to all this is not having it around or working properly. At this point a major reason one would want to prolong the sensor life is not because of cost, but because of the simple fact that replacing it means a whole 12 hours of somewhat unreliable readings. Argh! I think it's pretty much a given that one should do sensor replacements at night. When my first sensor was going bad, and then the second one was refusing to work properly after insertion, I was literally depressed; we went to a party that evening and I must have been annoying as all heck to everyone, because all I kept doing was looking at the receiver and willing it to work, dammit!
Maybe I'm in a honeymoon period of sorts. Maybe I'll get disillusioned. I've read blogs from people who have. It's not a fully mature product or technology, by any means. You have to be patient and willing to work through some minor hassles. But it's definitely mature enough to work, and when it works, it's like a different world.
Hey, self-promotion is all the rage these days.
Oh, and note I'm calling it "the thing". There is reason for that, because it has by now taken a life of its, and it is controlling me, guiding my thoughts, running my life...
What would you expect from something that has such a huge say on how I manage my diabetes anyway?
I think I mentioned it before, but the best way I have to describe the thing's profound
impact is this:
It allows me to make many small accurate corrections instead of few big less accurate ones.
As any type I who is also brittle and using short-acting insulin (that is, me) will tell you, our life is this constant diabetes management hyper-course. Thing is, because you could never really tell where your blood sugars were headed unless they were headed there at a pretty sharp clip, you'd develop these ideas about how your body does things. With me, and my chronic fear of hypos (not unusual amongst our tribe), it was always the fear of going under 100. Because I can easily drop 50 mg/dl in 15 minutes, and would do so regularly. So 100 was always a scary number, because it meant 50 was just around the corner, and 50 ain't good.
So if I found myself at, say, 100 an hour after lunch, I'd immediately correct up, no matter what. Now, sometimes that would work well, and I'd catch a hypo before it happened. But sometimes it would be too late, and I'd already hypoed and rebounded and hadn't noticed it, meaning my correction was simply adding to an already rising trend, resulting in a nice, fat 400 on my meter an hour later. And sometimes it would be an unnecessary reaction, because I in fact got the ideal combination of bolus and food, making it so I managed to flatten my post-meal blood sugars due to the combination of glycemic indexes and amount of insulin taken at just the perfect time. It does happen. Thing is, when you hit this ideal the last thing you want is mess with it, and my "correction" would inevitably mess with it.
In other words, I lived in constant fear. Fear of the unnoticed, unmitigated hypo that would send me plummeting to the floor in the middle of a meeting, or make me completely incoherent in front of a client, or what have you. The same would happen after dinner, when the fears intensified, because I was going to be asleep soon.
In retrospect, it's practically a miracle that I had managed to keep my A1C's down around 7% for so many years. I did it by pricking my fingers 15+ times per day, trying to make more and smaller corrections rather than big ones, but doing quite a poor job at it because, well, I could never test as frequently as I needed to all the time. It's just not practical.
And then came the thing.
It's amazing what that little trend graph does. I can look at it and at a glance know where I stand, and figure out where I will be in 10, 20, 30 minutes. Extrapolating is easy as pie. There is no guesswork involved; it's all visual, it's all right there.
And the immediate result? I'm not afraid of 100 anymore. I'm not afraid of 90, or 80, or even 70 for that matter. Case in point: yesterday night before going to sleep I was dropping, and feeling it. Before the thing, I'd have tested myself at some point to see I was around 100. I would then react severely, stuffing myself with a bunch of quickly digestible carbs, test again 30 minutes later and see myself at somewhere in the 160-200 range, and say "OK, great, no hypo tonight" and go to sleep. I'd sometimes wake up high anyway, not sure what happened along the way.
Not now, though. This time I had data, real data. First of all, I was dropping slowly, at a constant rate of about 3.5 mg/dl per 5 minutes. That meant I had time to let the trend establish, because I was only dropping about 42 mg/dl per hour, enough time to react calmly. So I ate something small, and waited. I went down to 90, then 80, then 70, which is when I drank some OJ and ate a bit of honey. As expected, the honey and OJ "caught" about 15 minutes later, just as I hit 60, raised me to 130 or so, and kept me there. Never triggered the liver to release glucagon, never went too high, never over-reacted.
Woke up in the 150's after a nice stable night. Beautiful.
This keeps happening; my ability to make these smaller, measured fixes "just in time" is almost beyond belief. The calming effect this has is also a benefit, even if not easily quantifiable. And it sure keeps me flatter through the day because I can anticipate as well as react better.
The downside to all this is not having it around or working properly. At this point a major reason one would want to prolong the sensor life is not because of cost, but because of the simple fact that replacing it means a whole 12 hours of somewhat unreliable readings. Argh! I think it's pretty much a given that one should do sensor replacements at night. When my first sensor was going bad, and then the second one was refusing to work properly after insertion, I was literally depressed; we went to a party that evening and I must have been annoying as all heck to everyone, because all I kept doing was looking at the receiver and willing it to work, dammit!
Maybe I'm in a honeymoon period of sorts. Maybe I'll get disillusioned. I've read blogs from people who have. It's not a fully mature product or technology, by any means. You have to be patient and willing to work through some minor hassles. But it's definitely mature enough to work, and when it works, it's like a different world.
posted by Blinkered at 9:06 PM
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