Holidays, times zones, basal FAIL!!!

[Aoife]

I am after some advice on how people deal with basal insulin when going on holiday to different time zones. I take Levemir twice a day (10 units at 10am and 14 units at 10pm).

Up until last week most of my holidays have been either to Europe or Africa (very little time difference) or I had a trip to Australia which was fairly easy to deal with as I just swapped the doses around when day became night and night became day!

Last week I went on holiday to New York and had an epic diabetes fail for the 5 days I was there. Admittedly the portion sizes had me confused and the huge amount of walking we did was also a factor but I seemed to swing between huge highs and lows the whole time. Rather than blame my carb counting I would like to blame my basal

How do people cope with changing time zones? Do you stick to English timing (this doesn't sound right as 1) I don't want to be waking up to inject at 2am and 2) the timings I have are in a bid to outwit DP. Do you immediately change to new time zone timing (then surely some part of the day either gets over or under dosed). Or is there another way of sorting the issue. I was only away for 5 days so gradually altering my timings wasn't really an option.

In hindsight I should have maybe thought about this before so I could ask some advise rather than it just occurring to me as we were half way over the Atlantic!

 

[DeusXM]

Gradually altering is an option - you just have to start the process before you go away. In any case, New York is only 4-5 hours behind the UK (dependent on time of year) so you could probably just about get away with taking your basal 4 hours earlier right off the bat, although I'd recommend moving it in 2-hour increments.

Your basal though probably wasn't the culprit. The stress of travelling, the excitement of being somewhere new, unfamiliar food (particularly from a culture that makes a lot of use of HFCS), unfamiliar activity patterns - a perfect storm for making D control difficult! Hope you enjoyed it all the same though.

 

[Lauras87]

When I went to Oz I was told to keep to UK times to inject til I got to oz then switch to their time & coming back keep on oz time til I landed back in UK.

I will just point out that I was under the care of my gp for my diabetes at that time. God knows that my consultant would of said

 

[trophywench]

Well I never asked anyone when we went to Oz, but as I was on 2x daily Levemir and they are roughly half a day in front, it was easy.

I expect it is relatively easy on a pump anyway, just change the time and date (if necessary) setting to local time when you get there I suppose? I mean the journey to Oz is a bit confusing because of having the stop at halfway plus. For under a 12 hour journey I probably wouldn't change my pump settings until after I got off the plane, bearing in mind no Bluetooth during the flight. Otherwise I'd have to do it before I got on the plane. Or something. (otherwise you get an error message cos the pump time doesn't match the meter time, or vice versa)

We only tend to go to Europe these days so just change it while we are in the tunnel ! and get rid of the error message.

 

[ch1ps]

Hi

I have found this website to be very good. You can let it know that you split your basal and it works out the times you should inject.

http://www.voyagemd.com/

Good luck 🙂

 

[Aoife]

Your basal though probably wasn't the culprit. The stress of travelling, the excitement of being somewhere new, unfamiliar food (particularly from a culture that makes a lot of use of HFCS), unfamiliar activity patterns - a perfect storm for making D control difficult! Hope you enjoyed it all the same though.

Thanks, I suspect you are right! They "helpfully" seem to put the calorie count next to the item in the menus (very off putting to see that you are about to eat nearly a days worth of calories at breakfast and around 100g of carbs as I found out when I looked it up at home) I am normally fairly insulin resistant in the mornings so over-estimating my insulin then is not usually a huge issue but compound that with walking a massive amount then I was destined to failure! All I seemed to do was correct hypos then correct hypers.

Hi

I have found this website to be very good. You can let it know that you split your basal and it works out the times you should inject.

http://www.voyagemd.com/

Good luck 🙂

That seems quite a helpful site although despite me telling it I do twice daily basal it still seemed to only work it out for once a day but I think I understand what it was trying to say, basically on the first day take half my basal dose at UK time and half at US time, so a total of 4 basal injections a day plus normal boluses....... fun times!

I have a trip to Las Vegas in the pipeline so I think I will try this then as the time difference will be much greater

Thanks!

 

[HOBIE]

I went to Istanbul on motorbike a few years ago. I think there was 3 different zones. I just evened it out & did lots of testing. Wasnt on pump then but would find it much easier now on pump. You have to be on the ball on a bike. Have a good holi 🙂

 

[Copepod]

Having 2 watches or a digital watch with dual time facility is very helpful - one for UK time, the other for local time - for working out when to inject.