Up All Night

April 2, 2012

Well, baby, you’re still on my mind but, I have to admit, not as obsessively as 6 weeks ago. And this is a good thing. I can’t fully explain it except as a mixture of things: The weather has gotten nicer so my overall mood has lifted. I started socializing with a great group of T1 ladies, and made a cool friend in the process. Work has been super super busy due to MCAS ramping up and just because of where we are in the year. Probably most of all because B (aka “Dad”) and I have been more aggressive with getting my overnight/morning numbers down to improve my A1c. Not surprisingly, I’m totally focused on getting this magical number down in time for our next dr. appointment in about one month. Like so many T1Ds, I have a lot of emotion, self-worth, and failure/success perspectives wrapped up in my A1c. I think this is very easy for other PWDs to understand; I think many people in the health care profession don’t quite comprehend how much that one little number can make or break our day and attitude. Also, where you are concerned, the A1c is paramount. I have to be below 7.0 to get the go ahead to concieve. A year ago I scoffed at that fact—Oh, please, I thought, that will be no problem. I’d been between 5.8 and 6.4 for over a year (my first year, I might add, of even having diabetes. Oh naïve one.). In January, when my endo dropped the “7.0” bomb on me, I cried. But, through that news, both B and I learned a lot and finally became more proactive of late. Basically, I had a “duh” moment: The averages displayed on my PDM or digital log book only counted the numbers recorded when I tested 6-9 times a day. Obvious, right? But, hell-O!, then there were a whole 8-10 hours (depending on day of the week) where no finger pricks were happening! Between the before bed and before breakfast tests, my blood sugar was just hanging out, free wheeling, doing whatever it wanted, sowing it’s wild oats, no curfew, no nothin’. And I was paying for it via my A1c.

I’d been waking up with high numbers for a while but, because before January my A1cs were so good, no one thought to be too focused on it. Now, however, I had a wake up call that I needed to see what the hell was going on overnight. And what a wake up call it was—last week and into this week I started setting my alarm for one to two times a night to wake up and test. You wouldn’t think waking up twice a night for a measly 45 seconds to prick your finger would matter much in your level of exhaustion. WRONG. Let me tell you, I was beat last week. Mid-week, I thought, “Hey! This is good practice for when I’m up with a bambino twice a night. See this isn’t so bad.” Then I realized that that 45 seconds would likely be more like 45 minutes. And it probably wouldn’t be only twice a night. And that I was going to be tired. Really really tired. Oh, baby, you’re already disrupting my sleep. Thanks.

We changed my 8pm-12am basal last night, raising it from 3.5 u/hr to 4.5. My number at the 12:00am alarm: 184. But at 6:00a.m? 102! Yippee! 7:20? 73. Oookk…pre-meal, that’s okay. But at 8:00 after I’d taken a full dose of insulin for breakfast? Well, so low I skipped the testing and went straight for the fruit snacks since I was cross eyed and the kids were arriving in 15 minutes. So we still have some work to do, but things are definitely headed in the right direction. Meanwhile, I’ll think of you tonight when my alarm cries for the 3:00 a.m. testing.