Well I survived the night and the experiment continues.....
I will post my daily graph from yesterday and so far this morning.....
Yesterday's graph, I will confess I slept late and didn't get up till 10am. You can see the long period in the red which is a common feature for me, even with no evening Levemir dose particularly after exercise. It is now looking like the previous morning's dose of 24u injected at 9.12am on the 25th still had some activity left in it and this is part of what I am trying to establish with this experiment. These hypos are generally very mild and I don't double check them because that would mean I lose too much sleep, but generally Libre reads lower than my Caresens BG meter at low levels, so I suspect a considerable proportion of that red will not be below 3.9 and very little if any below 3.5mmols. I woke up when my low alarm went off at 4.5 and I ate 1 jelly baby thinking that there was no insulin in my system, so a single JB (5g carbs) would be enough, but it never brought be back up above 4.5 so I didn't get another low alarm and slept on. Again this is a common occurrence.... and maybe I should have learned from it by now, but there are times when 2 JBs will take me up to 8 and I sleep really badly at that level whereas I sleep pretty well even when my levels are in the red a bit and I can get back to sleep within 2 mins of chewing a JB to fix it. They really do not bother me at all..... which I know is something that I have to be wary of, but good sleep is really important to me.
The next dip in the graph into the red is where I jabbed the 10u of Fiasp for breakfast and to cover FOTF and whatever basal I normally get from my Levemir in the morning, which with hindsight was clearly too much, so I have learned from that lesson. After that I had a long period from 11am until 6pm when things were really stable with just a couple of small jabs of Fiasp (1.5u and 2u) At 6pm I was 6.3 and about to go out and do some physical activity having been pretty sedentary all day watching the rain lash down! I had decided that I would inject some more Fiasp when I was between 6.5 and 7 but I seemed to be quite stable in the low 6s for about an hour, so I headed out and levels shot up to 8.3 with an upward sloping arrow within 10 mins of leaving the house which was quite a surprise. I jabbed 2 units and carried on up the hill. 20 mins later I was 9.2 and still heading up so I hit it with another 1.5u and continued my steady but exertive activity. Hindsight tells me that 2.5u on 8.3 would have been enough and I wouldn't have needed the second jab. Got back home at 7.30pm to levels dropping rapidly and needed 2 JBs to stop the drop and jabbed 4u for my evening meal (50g carbs) with a slight deduction for planned exercise to follow it. Got to 8.1 and leveled out after the meal but then took off again and I jabbed 2 units at 9.30pm when I hit 9.8 with an upward sloping arrow. More physical activity saw it come crashing down and by 10.05pm I was 5.1 and a vertical downward arrow and needed 2 JBs but by 10 48pm I was back up to 8.1 with a vertical upward arrow! I got a little gung-ho and jabbed another 3 units thinking my liver was suddenly alive and kicking and this was increased basal requirement after a day of it being quite quiet. Of course I ended up dropping into the red a tiny bit again and needed some more JBs after I got into bed but from about 1.30 am I had the measure of it and just needed 2 units just before 4am and another 1.5 at 6.30am when I rose into the 6s.
I did quite a lot of exercise long before breakfast this morning which is why I had a minor dip into the red at 9am. I jabbed by usual 2u FOTF buster just before I got out of bed at 7.30am and on top of the 1.5 units I had injected an hour earlier and the 2 hours of exercise I did before breakfast, I ended up needing 20g carbs so those 2 units were unnecessary. Since then my levels have been steady again, very much like yesterday and ticking along with very little extra insulin than my bolus for breakfast plus 1 extra unit to cover basal, but getting ready to jab another unit and a half now as just hit 6mmols.
My conclusion is that so far, is that it looks like I don't need such a large morning Levemir dose, but might need a bigger dose earlier in the evening, which I can then whittle down for exercise a lot more than just the 3 units I was previously adjusting, so a lower morning dose and having more adjustment on the evening dose will hopefully help me prevent those nocturnal hypos. Going to continue through today and probably tonight as the more experience I get at this, the better I learn to balance things with just the Fiasp and the more meaningful the results get are to draw useful conclusions from.
@Satan’s little helper Libre is absolutely essential to both the safety and success of this experiment in my opinion and I am not sure I would have had the guts to try it without a CGM. My low carb diet also helps I think. Yes, I have access to a ketone meter and strips but haven't felt the need to use it so far, but doing lots and LOTS of Libre scanning with my trusty reader.
@Lucyr I think I mistyped my thoughts last night. What I meant to say is that if I injected Fiasp 6 hours ago and my levels are still in the 6s, do I need to be concerned about DKA. I had previously assumed that FIasp was only active for 3 hours but this experiment is changing my views on that too and it looks like there is still a bit of activity in it after that and perhaps enough to keep me ticking over between 3 and 5hrs post injection. I certainly did not mean to suggest that I would leave it 6 hours after the last Fiasp injection had run it's course, which it appears I actually wrote, although I suspect my levels would tell me I needed insulin well before then. I have not gone longer than 5 hours yesterday without jabbing some and I have lowered my high alarm to 7mmols to give me more advance notice of it rising which it definitely does quite rapidly once I need some more.
@everydayupsanddowns I had my C-pep tested at diagnosis but I was borderline low at the time and only on 7 units of basal and that gradually increased over the first 2 years to my current dose of 20-24 in the morning and 0-5 in the evening so basically about 4x what it was at diagnosis, so I suspect I don't have much left and my problems are/were that large morning Levemir dose lasting slightly longer than 24 hours which I didn't think was possible.
@mashedupmatt Pleased you are finding my experiment interesting. I am loving it albeit I woke a lot through the night last night to check levels, so definitely not to be recommended long term and those crazy spikes last night before bed were, shall I say challenging, but partly because I let things go a little too long and partly because I started chasing the dragon's tail with my Libre readings.
. I have dropped the H for hybrid as of course I have the ability to add in carbs as well as insulin. I am really surprised that this very crude attempt at mimicking a pump is being so incredibly effective and giving such stable results.....so far anyway!
