Hey y’all. It’s Columbus day; and, yes, I am at work again.
I know it’s been a little quiet around here recently. There are a few reasons for that. (1) I’ve been really busy with swimming, bicycling, running, yard work, birthday celebrations, and visiting friends. (2) I’m doing something fun (to me) at the office, that’s taking a lot of my attention. (3) The camera club that I sometimes attend has restarted. It’s the same as it ever was. Evidently I am, too. (4) We went to Montréal this past weekend. (5) I’m trying to keep up more with my Twitter peeps. (6) I’m reading a lot, although I’m very slow at it. Most recently I’ve finished Ahmed Rashid’s Taliban, and I picked up The Discovery of Insulin by Michael Bliss just where I left it this spring, about a third of the way through. (More about each of those books later.) And (7) I have a boatload of things that I want to do.
I’ve been having some interesting diabetes things going on. I finally finished annotating my CGMS data, matching the graph’s spikes and troughs with my food/exercise/insulin logbook. The data was all over the place — literally — but mostly high. I tried a few of the suggestions that my endocrinologist gave, with mixed results; but I have decided to focus on what I can observe myself and fix on my own: namely my basal rates. After making a couple small corrections and overnight tests, I’ve managed to wake up with almost exactly the same blood glucose readings as when I went to bed. And the last couple times that I’ve exercised in the afternoon have worked out very, very well. I’m steadily getting where I want to be.
Of course, eating a multi-course meal at Le Keg on Saturday presented a new challenge: How exactly do you bolus for something that involves about 12oz of incredibly tasty New York strip sirloin — not to mention bread, a Caesar salad, pain au fromage, a (small) baked potato, veggies, and a chocolate brownie sundae? I did quite well for the first three hours after dinner — I had multiple readings in the 120s, which is almost perfect — but then I steadily climbed quite high over the next five hours. Somehow I need to figure out when I need to give extra insulin and then figure out how to give those additional 7.5 units* over the next four hours. It seems to me that I need extra practice!
Breakfast on the day after the feast
Until next time.
* — I learned while reading The Discovery of Insulin that a “unit” was the amount of insulin that would cause a healthy rabbit to go into hypoglycemic shock. Lisa and I have started talking about insulin in terms of “rabbits.”
That rabbit fact is awesome! Except it makes me feel sad to think of a little low rabbit.
rabbits always get the short end of the stick. first, the draize test, and, now, this!