Morning all --
Well, it may just be a morning buzz, but I don't feel on the floor anymore and have no other symptoms
so I doubt this is the pig one...E said he felt weirdly rough yesterday afternoon, but nothing has emerged there either, and his bgls also don't show any blip (hurray!). So whatever we are battling is mild...Shall try to *do* something then today! Useless day yesterday, sleeping and feeling swooshy every time I stood up!
Pasta update: 4 hours seems *almost* right for us (at the moment
🙄). Unbelievably, he tested at something like 7.6 after 2 hours, 5.2 after 3 hours, 6.3 after four hours (at which point dual wave ended). Then at five hours (one hour after ending) he was 5.3 ish. Then he had a shower, which may have hurried on the insulin, because when he emerged he was 4.3 and starting to feel a little wobbly. We deliberately made a straightforward dinner (roast chicken, new pots and corn for kids, salad for us!), and the evening also saw no spike from earlier pasta. So all good! What we think we will do next time is try five hours: he's going a little low after the dual wave finishes on 4 hours, so maybe extendiing it will spread things out a bit...? (Is this right? Does anyone know?!)
I can't *believe* the lack of spike...
Bedtime also looking good: was at 6.7 at 10.30pm. Because of all the fuss over the weekend, and two nights of weird 3am highs, we gave him some free carb *just to be sure*: half a glass of milk, and a small biscuit (about 11g). At 3am he was 8mmols! Yay. This is progress -- went up as we expected, and, provided he tests at around that number this morning (famous last words!
😱), I think we are certainly almost back to a secure nighttime rate.
Phew!
We have looked at evening numbers over last days though, and given that he has had a tendency to ride around 4-5mmol last thing (and we want him slightly higher for bedtime), we are pulling back the basal rates for 7-9pm and 9pm-12am by 0.05u/hr. You may remember that it was *precisely* these rates we raised a month ago! At the same time we changed the dinner ratio. This all worked for a while, but clearly now things have re-jigged and one of them is too much. The ratio seems a good one -- 2 hour post meal results are almost universally good; it's the pre-bedtime reading which is low: hence we are lowering the basal to raise him slightly.
I wouldn't be surprised if we amalgamate the two evening basal rates into one for the holidays; we eat later and he stays up later, so it could be we need to switch the whole thing to running from 8pm...but we'll see the effect of these tweaks first...(Watch this space as post meal rises once again! argh...)
***
Bev, we are very hooked into our spreadsheet from our pump consultant, which I think the hospital uses for everyone who is interested. We don't write on it -- excel, so lines too small! -- but it has spaces for things like basal rates, ratios, bgls, setting temp basals, free carbs, as well as a comments section for exercise, foods. My husband sits down with it every other day or so and fills it all in so we can see patterns -- or not! It has in-built a system of colours too -- green, yellow and red -- for bgls being in target, high, or low respectively. We send the sheets to our dietician/DSN every few days or as needed, and she responds with suggested changes highlighted in blue! Sounds complicated but works well for us.
Daily, we use the sheets I sent you to record in a messy way, just sitting in the kitchen.
Mand, I think we did get sent a log book with the MiniMed -- but we obviously decided against it completely! Guess we had too much on the go...
***
Re number of basal rates: we started with five rates, and have expanded during the school day to six I think...The shortest any one of ours runs is two hours; the longest, eight (through the night -- we find we are not dealing with a major dawn phenomenon, so don't ramp up the insulin until he's virtually out of bed -- 9.30am during holidays and weekends!)
For now!
xxoo
