Good morning,
@cherryvalley.
I owe you an apology: when you last posted in March I replied by welcoming you to the forum - having forgotten that I also welcomed you in Dec '24! Like @ Wendal I have also now read back to get a fuller picture of your circumstances. Also, as
@Wendal says being panc'yless does make things a fair bit more challenging - at first!
My experience has been that managing my D has taken time - more than I ever realised it could or would. BUT the reassuring thing is that gradually time has allowed me to find a varied and enjoyable diet, learning how different food types and meals affect ME. Not only affecting my blood glucose (BG), but my digestive system as a whole, reducing the frequency of embarrassing and messy mishaps. For my 1st 12 months my world was becoming pretty miserable, reluctant to leave home until I'd got some certainty that my bowels had finished misbehaving - never mind richocheting from hypo to hyper as I seemed to be permanently on the diabetes roller coaster.
Time has allowed me to learn how to carb count, leaving me confident today that I not only am happy about the carbs within any meal at home, but how to manage bolus dosing for any meal I wanted to choose from an unfamiliar restaurant or café menu. That modest task alone seemed a pretty steep montain to climb, but its turned out to be doable. And not just counting the carbs for a sensible bolus dose, but I now feel pretty confident in the essential, necessary, business of adjusting (reducing or increasing) that "assessed" bolus dose, according to how busy or active I've been "yesterday, today and might be tomorrow". Without sometimes needing bolus adjustments on a meal by meal basis each bolus doesn't necessarily provide the expected outcome.
Time has allowed me to find a balance between frequent glances at my CGM readings and recognising when to trust those CGM readings or recognising when they were suspect; CGM has some limitations, which the manufacturers don't bother to emphasise sufficiently and only my personal trial and learning has brought me to the point that I can see my CGM is possibly wrong and misleading me. Yesterday my CGM was misbehaving all day and I changed it at midnight, after a day of 10+ finger pricks confirming my CGM was consistently wrong. But this was not a problem for me - time has allowed me to be confident in managing my D, despite CGM being blatantly wrong. I stayed more or less in range all day, from finger prick results.
Time has also allowed me to improve my inner recognition of how I'm feeling: when I wake; as I encounter ailments not caused by my D - but those ailments affecting my BG; my recognition of stress and emotions (sadness or delight) which triggers hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol - with major hidden consequences for my BG from the unseen, hidden, glucose releases by my liver .
The good news is that time does allow us to learn our own "tricks and tips" for easier and better D management. You had major surgery with massive trauma for your body in 2024. Outwardly your body may have healed, the scar fading and the memory of the run up to that surgery also fading. But dealing with the inner medical and psychological trauma of everything, including your new status as an insulin dependent T3c, needs more than months - in my experience. I'm alive, 5 yrs on from my Whipples and doing OK. I'm aging (and these days the little aging niggles are noticeably more frequent and take longer to resolve); the aging is not specifically caused by my D, but can amplify wobbly BG behaviour.
So, how to help YOU. My first (non-medical) bit of advice is cut yourself some slack: be kind to yourself and accept things have changed. YOU can get past today for a better tomorrow, next month, next year.
How are you doing with your carb counting today?
Are you still very tethered to your DSN, or feeling more independent and free to adjust both your insulins?
Can you explain to yourself (and us if you want to) exactly which daily challenges are bothering you?
Can you make a list, in order of importance or relevance, of those challenges? From that list isolate the No 1 challenge and perhaps we can help you find solutions to that first thing; then the 2nd, and so on.
Let time help heal the trauma and give you the benefit of trial and learning.
Most of all: manage your expectations. Diabetes is Complicated, Confusing and Contradictory. Each of us is different and we have to find different solutions. None of us who are insulin dependent have perfect days, every single day. Our D throws curved balls at us, all too frequently; it doesn't know any rules; its Contradictory. Steadily we get to recognise when all is not right and steadily we learn how to manage those days when we are wearing the wrong colour socks for our D. We learn how to deal with the Complicated nature of D. We learn how to spot when our D is simply trying to Confuse us and when to calmly let those Confusing signals pass quietly by. It is not easy. Nevertheless it is possible to get most things about right (note: not perfect) and then our D drifts rather more into the background (thanks to time and learning).
Do keep asking questions. Members are amazingly willing to share their experiences and gently help, but we can't do that if you don't ask. No question is stupid; we've all been through this process of adjusting to change.