The sad irony of a beekeeper with Diabetes!

[rebrascora]

You need to test

Yes I am testing frequently. It was 9.3 before dinner last night and 8.3 two hours later. I had a lovely meal with my partner (he has mostly been eating ready meals whilst I have been trying to get my diet sorted out these past few weeks) of ham hock with potatoes, carrots, cauliflower and broccoli with a cheese sauce. I put 2 pieces of boiled potato on my plate but only managed to eat one and 2/3 of the veg and meat.... basically I dished up a plate of food that would have been my normal portion size a couple of months ago and it was way too much... I can't remember a time when I didn't clear my plate.... so this was a bit of a revelation, but a good one..... and I have the leftovers for another day. My reading 2 hours later just before bed was 8.3 so that was a big improvement as it had gone down after dinner instead of up. Took my Levemir insulin and went to bed. Absolutely delighted to report my fasting reading this morning was 6.2 and 2 hours later before my breakfast omelette it was still 6.2. Those are my first readings in the normal range since this started and two identical readings 2 hours apart is even better! Just finished my omelette and green salad and will be testing in 2 hours..... can't wait! I haven't used the insulin with this meal as there are no appreciable carbs in it, so will be interesting to see what happens. Fingers crossed I don't rise too much. I didn't really expect to see such instant results and for it to be within the normal range straight away.

 

[rebrascora]

Lovely to hear your stories about bees and that you have been planting flowers for them. Some of the best flowers are the wild ones and in particular dandelions so please don't be too keen to eradicate those rays of sunshine. I find that they love marjoram which grows wild next to my hives but I also have lots of lemon balm. I am fortunate to have lots of wild forage for my bees and in fact the bees have actively "gardened" the adjacent bankside above my house over the past 20 years, selectively pollenating and hence propagating all the things that they like best, so it is a wilderness of flowering cherry, brambles, black thorn, hawthorn, rosebay willowherb, meadow sweet and Himalayan balsam. to name the main ones but there are lots more. The bankside was grazed when I was a child but then fell fallow and has now been returned to wilderness in large part by the efforts of my bees. It provides cover and forage for many other creatures including badgers, deer and hares which I see on a regular basis and a barn owl visits to hunt the rodents in summer. Yes it looks a mess if you only see things in terms of "man conquering nature" type gardening but there is much beauty in it too and the wild flowers are infinitely healthier for the bees than the fields of crops which cover most of the countryside and are treated with toxic chemicals. I love watching the bees returning with pollen on their legs and working out which type of flower they have been visiting for that colour pollen.... there are even online pollen charts, just like DIY store paint charts, where you can see which plant produces which colour pollen from dirty white brambles, to red (snowdrops) to petrol blue (rosebay willowherb) and of course the more common yellow and orange pollens from the likes of dandelion and gorse.
Anyway, I have taken enough space on this thread with bees, so will investigate starting a new thread for that and try to keep this to my progress with tackling my diabetes from here on in.

 

[rebrascora]

Gone up to 7.0 two hours after breakfast but I don't think that is too bad, especially compared with my previous readings. Heading out into the garden to do some work and try to bring it down a little.

 

[rebrascora]

Well, I had my first hypo yesterday which was a bit scary. Came down from a fasting reading of 10.3 to 3.4 after my breakfast where I took 4 units of NovoRapid with bacon and egg and mushrooms with half a thick slice of wholemeal bread. I thought I was following the advice from my dietician of including small portions of carbs with each meal rather than avoiding altogether for 2 meals and then having it all on an evening. My partner only had thick sliced bread in the house as I haven't been eating bread, so I thought half a slice was a smaller than normal portion. Did better today as I had a whole slice with just 2 units and went up from a fasting reading of 7.o to 9.0. I guess tomorrow I will try 3 units depending on what my fasting reading is. I suppose things are going to be a bit erratic in these early stages until I get this figured out.
I got a cancellation appt with a dietician on Monday and she is running a Carbohydrate Counting Course next Tues which she says I can join, so hopefully that will help me get to grips with balancing things better.

The hypo did knock my confidence quite a bit as I was not really expecting to take such a fast nose dive. Thankfully I was in the house at the time and was able to rest and let my glucose tablets take me back up but I had 2 failed attempts to get blood readings because I was shaking and struggling to get enough blood from my finger prick before I was successful and got the 3.4 reading. I texted my sister to let her know what was happening and my partner arrived home for lunch shortly afterwards, so I had support during my recovery, but it did make me realise just how serious this is!

 

[Drummer]

I probably should not write this - me not being on insulin or anything at all - but my immediate thought was stick with the half a slice and reduce the insulin - closely followed by 'show it who's boss' - and you need to refine the instructions to suit how you react, not what might be expected.
Don't let a slight hitch at the start of the learning process dent your confidence in your ability to cope with this whole new juggling act - you did everything exactly right the first time you needed to do it - - gold star for that.

 

[rebrascora]

Thanks @Drummer I appreciate your input
I'm a bit torn at the moment between the medical advice which is that I need carbs....and the information I am reading about low carbs, higher fat diets.....I'm reading the "8 week blood sugar diet" by Dr Michael Mosely. I don't know enough about my diabetes yet to make an informed decision either way, so I am leaning towards a small to moderate amount of complex carbs for each meal at the moment until I get a better idea of balancing things on a more "normal" diet before I start experimenting with other diets. That way, if anything goes wrong I can at least say that I am following the advice given by my health care professionals, rather than contravening their advice, especially when I have sought their opinion on "Keto" etc. I do think there is something about a low carb diet that is interesting/appealing even, but I just don't know enough at this stage to follow it without the support of my health care professionals and they are now very much leaning towards me being Type 1 or somewhere between 1 and 2, which may make a difference here.

 

[Drummer]

If you are injecting insulin you need to be balancing it with your carb input - that is the need for carbs, it is an absolute really - but if you have the freedom to adjust your dose - as you say you did, my fist - and now second thought - is to tune the insulin to the carbs as you wish to eat them. That way you can settle into a menu of meals, each one familiar and routine and fine tune your insulin, the amount, the timing, all the nuances which type ones write about, so as to get if not the same response at least a good average about which all your results hover ever more closely.

 

[Robin]

Thanks @Drummer I appreciate your input
I'm a bit torn at the moment between the medical advice which is that I need carbs....and the information I am reading about low carbs, higher fat diets.....I'm reading the "8 week blood sugar diet" by Dr Michael Mosely. I don't know enough about my diabetes yet to make an informed decision either way, so I am leaning towards a small to moderate amount of complex carbs for each meal at the moment until I get a better idea of balancing things on a more "normal" diet before I start experimenting with other diets. That way, if anything goes wrong I can at least say that I am following the advice given by my health care professionals, rather than contravening their advice, especially when I have sought their opinion on "Keto" etc. I do think there is something about a low carb diet that is interesting/appealing even, but I just don't know enough at this stage to follow it without the support of my health care professionals and they are now very much leaning towards me being Type 1 or somewhere between 1 and 2, which may make a difference here.

Mealtime insulin has basically been developed to cope with the digestive pattern of a 'normal' or 'average' meal, which for most people consists of a mix of fat, protein and carbs. It’s easier to stick to this type of meal when you are getting used to insulin. Eating a low carb meal when using insulin can result in a hypo after a couple of hours, followed by a rise later on, because the meal is digesting more slowly, and the insulin gets into the system faster. It’s not impossible to work round, but it needs careful adjustment of the timing of the insulin, sometimes it needs the dose to be split, all things that aren’t recommended for a beginner. It’s like someone with L plates on being asked to do a hill start on their first driving lesson, before they’ve mastered clutch control!

 

[Ljc]

It sound like your body gave you a really good hypo warning. Yes they are scary but it sounds like you dealt with it well. One piece of advise I can give you is, if for any reason you are unable to test when hypo , maybe because you’re shaking too much is to treat the hypo then try test again 15 mins later by which time the shakes may have eased, if not then treat and try testing again in 15 mins .
A couple of times I have had really bad hypo symptoms and I just grabbed my dextrose tablets as they were close to me shoved them in my mouth then tested or rather tried to 🙄.

Robin’s advise is spot on. In time you will be making your own decisions about how much insulin you need and when to take it, including if you need to split the units for that particular meal (don’t worry about that now ok ) however you are at the very beginning with insulin and your nurse/ dietitian is too so my advise is to go by the advise they have given you basically the doses they start us out on is their best guess, so their is much tweaking to be done.
Later on when you have learned how to adjust your insulin to carbs eaten then you can start changing your diet.

It’s great to hear that you are going in a carb counting course soon, it a very flexible regime.