• Please Remember: Members are only permitted to share their own experiences. Members are not qualified to give medical advice. Additionally, everyone manages their health differently. Please be respectful of other people's opinions about their own diabetes management.
  • We seem to be having technical difficulties with new user accounts. If you are trying to register please check your Spam or Junk folder for your confirmation email. If you still haven't received a confirmation email, please reach out to our support inbox: support.forum@diabetes.org.uk

Hello, new to these forums!

Status
This thread is now closed. Please contact Anna DUK, Ieva DUK or everydayupsanddowns if you would like it re-opened.
HG061291

HG061291

New Member
Relationship to Diabetes
Type 1
Hello Everyone 🙂

I have been T1D for over ten years now, and i know myself I am not well controlled. I am 27 now and starting to get some signs from my body that something needs to change. I would like to know if anyone has any tips on how they stay maintained.

Thanks in advance
 
HG061291 said:
Hello Everyone 🙂

I have been T1D for over ten years now, and i know myself I am not well controlled. I am 27 now and starting to get some signs from my body that something needs to change. I would like to know if anyone has any tips on how they stay maintained.

Thanks in advance
Click to expand...
Welcome to the forum, a good place to come for help to improve your control. I have certainly learnt most of what I know about my T1 from others on here.

It would help us to give appropriate advice if you let us know how you manage your D.
Are you on Injections or a pump?
What insulin’s are you using.

Have you thought about what specific thing you want to get sorted first?
In general if you can get your background insulin sorted it is easier to then sort out other stuff. When I was diagnosed, only a year earlier than you, I thought that I should do the basal rate testing because I had an appointment coming up with the consultant. I had not realised how important it was to change my insulin as the needs arise. I was struggling to get hypos and hypers sorted without realising I need to monitor my basal much more closely.

There is plenty of help available on here. Just ask. And no questions are considered silly.
 
Hi so my fast acting is nova rapid, and i now take levimir 2 x day for my background. My biggest problem is blood testing, i dont do it enough i think because when i really try my hardest and dont get the result i want its so dissapointing! I was also diagnosed in 2008 when i was 16 x
 
Those are the same insulins as I was using when on Multiple Daily Injections (MDI). The split Levemir should give you the greatest flexibility with adjustments.

I can understand that testing can be depressing as if things are not going well they simply confirm this and then it is even harder to motivate yourself, however much we know that it is knowing the BG that helps us to make the appropriate adjustments to our dose.

Are you in the care of the specialist team at the hospital? Whoever you are working with it is important to be honest with them about wanting to get things back on track. They are there to help.

It might help you to start by keeping a log of your readings. You could start to fix in always testing at bedtime and in the morning. This would help you to get any adjustments to your night time dose of Levemir and get a good start to the day. I found it helped me to colour my readings as to whether they were in range (green) or above (red). You could start with a wider ‘in range’ band , and then as you get things sorted gradually reduce this. I found the visual image of the readings coloured up helped me to focus on getting more green than red, and then to improve on this.

Whatever you decide to do start with small manageable targets and keep in touch we are happy to help in any way that we can.
 
I was under a specialist and then i went a bit off the rails and even though i inject when i should i know my control needs some work. I have made appts to see the specialist nurse next week, as i dka'd once in 2017 and then a near miss earlier this week and it knocks you for 6 for days.
 
That is a good start. Make the most of the appointment. They really are there to help, and they do understand how hard it can be. I am sure they will welcome your new plan to get things more under control.
Be honest with them about how you feel, and what you now want to achieve, they can then help you to avoid DKA in the future.

Remember to make your plan manageable. If you are not testing at a meal, you don’t know what correction is needed. Once you start to focus on this, the doses that you give can be more appropriate at each meal, including a correction as well as the dose for the carbs you eat, and that will start to show in your BG.
 
Ps
Just looked back at your original post. You have had a wobble at the time that is one of the hardest, transitioning from paediatric to adult care. You are not alone in that, but you have made the decision to start to sort this out, which is brilliant.

There is help available, and the forum is also a good place for a good rant if needed. We really do understand that T1 is rubbish (to put it mildly), but we can’t change that, but it is manageable.
 
Welcome to the forum @HG061291

Sorry to hear that your diabetes is beginning to cause you grief, but it is brilliant news that you have begun to reach out and connect with others online. It took me almost 20 years to do that, and honestly it was the biggest catalyst for me to improve my own diabetes care.

The great news is, T1 is a marathon, not a sprint, and it’s always worth chilling away at your levels trying to make them a bit more in range for a bit more of the time as you can. And any small improvements you make really do make a big difference long term, so no effort is wasted.

A few questions...

1. Have you ever been on any sort of education course for managing T1. DAFNE is a popular version, as is BERTIE (also available online for free) but different areas have their own arrangements.

If going on a course fills you with dread, you could get a lot of great info from a book like Think Like A Pancreas (Gary Scheiner) or Using Insulin (Walsh/Roberts).

2. When was the last time you gave your toolkit a once over? Half unit pen? Or one which records doses so you don’t get stuck wondering if you’ve jabbed for that? Meter with a bolus calculator? Alternative insulins? Pump? Libre?

3. You’ve already mentioned BG monitoring, and there’s no getting away from it... upping my frequency of checks was a big part of me making progress towards better levels. As was keeping notes of the results and what O was doing at the time / what I ate / physical activity / what I was experimenting with / alcohol / illness / forgotten doses.

It feels like a faff to begin with, but you won’t have to do it forever, and having decent records to check back over might help you to spot patterns that are impossible to see amid a flurry of chaotic results on a meter.

The important thing to remember is that this is all just information, it’s not judgement, and it’s not a record of how much effort you are putting in. It’s allowing you to look at things methodically. When I started doing that and finding patterns (and asking on forums when I was annoyed / confused by stuff) I suddenly found lots of my ‘diabetes randomness’ actually had causes I could work around and reduce or eliminate.

4. This would have been connect online - but you are already doing that 🙂

Good luck, and keep us posted.
 
Status
This thread is now closed. Please contact Anna DUK, Ieva DUK or everydayupsanddowns if you would like it re-opened.
Back
Top