Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Tim on October 30, 2011 at 2:01pm

I too often get frustrated that I'm not doing as good as person X or person Y says I ought to. Or even just as well as I'd like to be doing. At some point psychologically I have to work on me and what I can attain, and not what someone who has very easy to control diabetes is able to maintain.

I do have a hard time when someone comes to a discussion board moaning about how awful it is that they hit 140 and that's the worst their bg has ever been and how come they can't do better like they're supposed to. Mostly I can keep my mouth shut and not say anything condescending but I'm not always that successful.

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Permalink Reply by Nell on October 30, 2011 at 3:00pm

I never thought of it like this but this "no pattern" thing is my situation also. It is always interesting when my endo sees 2 or 3 days of lows or highs at a certain time and says 'here is a pattern' and wants to change something. The fact is, it is not a pattern. Because without changing anything, the next three days will show something else entirely. Someone said the other day that posters are the "cream of the crop" of diabetics. Well, that may be true for most, but certainly not for me.
No, I do not stay between 70 and 200.
Do you have a cgm? I do not but I have decided that is the only way to control the BG range, at least for those of us with bouncing BGs. I hope to get one after the first of the year. I have been trying to wait for the new smaller MM one since I have a MM pump. If only we could get progress info from FDA.....

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Permalink Reply by Jen on October 30, 2011 at 3:24pm

My endo often says he can't find any patterns in my readings. Which makes me feel a bit better because at least it's not just me ... But I'm the same way. Even if I happen to go low twice on two days in a row, I can not change anything and the next day I won't be low. Or I can adjust my pump settings and the next day I'll go high instead of low. It drives me crazy. It's like I fix one thing, move on to the next, and as I'm fixing that the first thing goes out of whack again. For example, I thought I had my overnight and morning readings nailed consistently being between 80-120 and was trying to work on after-breakfast readings, but now my overnight/morning readings are all out of whack again only a few weeks later. I understand always needing tweaking, but I constantly feel as if I'm just trying to "get the basics" down, never mind fine-tuning!

I don't have a CGM and at the moment can't afford one (and health benefits will not cover one), but I am definitely getting one as soon as I'm able to, because I think it would help a lot.

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Permalink Reply by Laddie on October 30, 2011 at 5:02pm

I'm the one who mentioned "cream of the crop". I didn't mean to imply that you had to have great results, but the fact that you're here learning about and discussing diabetes puts you in a special category. My endo indicates that she has a huge number of patients who hardly test at all and won't follow most or any of her instructions.

I think there is no doubt that some of us have an easier time getting good BG results than others. Certainly the stage of life you're in can make a big difference. Raging hormones for teenagers, women at that time of month, etc. can make blood sugar go haywire. And I think that some people have more hormone interference at each stage than others. Although the term "brittle" is outdated, I still believe that this journey is harder for some than others.

What I find so frustrating about Type 1 is all the things that can influence blood sugar: food, type of insulin, timing of injections, hormones, activity level, stress, type of carbs, pump site effectiveness, etc. and etc. I can't count the times that I've had great willpower and "followed all the rules" and then had a pump site go bad and send my BG into the 300's. Or eat my normal breakfast and then get a post-meal reading 150 points higher than yesterday.

I do think that my expectations for my BG readings are highly influenced by reading these message boards. If I eat any carbs, it is unusual for me to stay below 140 after the meal without going low later. I'm incredibly insulin and carb sensitive and often I struggle to identify meaningful patterns. It's unbelievable to me how many people here say that they can almost always stay between 70 and 140 and sometimes I feel stressed because I can't do that. That just isn't the diabetes I know. However, I'm 35 years into this disease with no significant complications. I manage to keep my a1c's below 6 despite some of the huge peaks I have. So I have to think I'm doing just fine.

These boards are great and I learn so much from them. I'm inspired by everyone (well, almost everyone) here. Anyone who takes time to read and/or post here is "cream of the crop" as far as I'm concerned.

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Permalink Reply by jrtpup on October 30, 2011 at 3:10pm

Jen, I figure you've done this already... have you looked at meal logs next to the modal day? I know you said the same meal produces different results - just wondering if you're eating the same meal at the same time of day? (Just fishing here.)

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Permalink Reply by Jen on October 30, 2011 at 3:32pm

I do eat pretty much the same things every day as long as I don't eat out. I think I need to start keeping logs that record absolutely everything but then the problem I find is how to use all that information in an organized way that can show cause and effect. And also how to decide how much to record without constantly writing stuff down.

Unfortunately starting tomorrow my schedule is no longer consistent (it's been really consistent the past three months) and that is going to make things even harder, but is not something I can help.

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Permalink Reply by jrtpup on October 30, 2011 at 4:20pm

It is a total pain writing everything down... I did it last week. I transferred all my BGs, food, stress, exercise, etc. to a spreadsheet organized by time, then organized it by time of day, then by meal.... I did discover a few things. Not having a regular schedule will for sure throw yet another monkey wrench in the works ;(

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Permalink Reply by Kari on October 30, 2011 at 3:41pm

Finding patterns often takes me many weeks to figure out. I'm like you - so different from day to day.It also seems like once I figure out what's wrong and make a change to a basal rate or an I:C ratio, I mess up a whole other part of the day! My ranges can be pretty big too sometimes. Just to give you an idea of where another T1 is...the past few days have been:

10/24: 46-187
10/25: 56-204
10/26: 44-213
10/27: 44-256
10/28: 58-137 (ok, that one was actually pretty decent)
10/29: 47-258
10/30: 88-170 so far

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Permalink Reply by Jen on October 30, 2011 at 4:09pm

Your range looks similar to mine:

10/24 - 56-362
10/25 - 41-266
10/26 - 83-194 - Great day!
10/27 - 59-230
10/28 - 104-238
10/29 - 92-214
10/30 - 52-212

Thanks for letting me know it's not just me! I also get what you mean by feeling like you change one thing and it messes some other part of the day up.

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Permalink Reply by Helmut on October 30, 2011 at 5:31pm

It is human nature to see patterns, even when there are no patterns. To me this means that if I cannot see a pattern then there really is no pattern. I had a hard time letting go of the dream that my BG will do the same as long as I do the same. This simply is not the case. I experience a high degree of randomness. The randomness seems to be more of a good day/bad day randomness than randomness within a day. I suspect that insulin absorption plays a big role. I am lucky enough to have a Dexcom 7+. The dex tells me whether it is a good day or a bad day and I adjust my insulin accordingly. It is important that I recognize as early as possible what day it is. I can never assume that today will be like yesterday.

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Permalink Reply by jrtpup on October 30, 2011 at 5:57pm

Love the duck Helmut :)

I attribute the randomness to what we don't know about D, the factors we're not even aware of. We have a lot to learn.

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Permalink Reply by acidrock23 on October 30, 2011 at 5:57pm

Does whatever gizmo you are looking at give you the Standard Deviation? That's the first thing I look at most of the time these days. The pump sort of keeps track of some of the other numbers but if I look at that and it's ok, I relax. Then I remember that I have to get the "real" number from the doc before I can *really* relax.

I recall your other report that there were some post parandials that were running up, did you try shooting more insulin (ratio-wise...) at them to see if that would help? I had this wierd stretch recently where my middle of the night numbers were running up and up and up so I turned my pump up, and them up some more and then some more and it finally fell into line. Now, of course, it's running low every morning so I guess I got carried away but, as I'm out of it in the AM and have an A1C coming up, I figure "I'll get around to it"...

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