It’s been a while since I’ve posted any personal updates so here’s the last month in a nutshell: Received Angelina’s new CGM transmitter with enlite sensors on Halloween! I was told we should hear from our trainer within 7-10 days but I am impatient so I sent our trainer an email and said “We want to start ASAP. Give me a time and place and we’ll be there!” (Okay, I’m paraphrasing, but you get the idea). She emailed me back later that day and said she would be at the clinic the following Tuesday (4 days later) and she had an hour she could squeeze us in.
Meanwhile, that same Friday: Angelina came down with her first cold since she was diagnosed with Type 1 in March. She didn’t have school due to a teacher work day and she was fine in the morning. Around noon I decided to head to Target to hit up their Halloween clearance (which was sadly disappointing). She sneezed twice in the car and I just figured it was her allergies. We stopped and grabbed a quick lunch at the Target Cafe before shopping. She started having a little cough while we were eating and about halfway through her sandwich she said “I’m not really hungry anymore.” Uh oh! That meant she got to drink real fully sugared soda because a Target Cafe sandwich is not low carb and there was no way she could skip out on not making up some carbs without dropping low. And, no, I don’t mean her dance moves.
By the time we got back to the Halloween section she was coughing pretty regularly and kept sneezing and had a runny nose and was just all around feeling pretty terrible. She seriously went from being perfectly fine to full-blown “I feel (and look) like Death warmed over” sickness in less than 30 minutes. Fortunately the Halloween clearance was pretty bare and incredibly disappointing (did I mention this?) and we were in and out of there pretty quickly. Took her home and made her some tea and she spent the rest of the afternoon on the sofa watching TV and burying herself in used tissues.
As the night wore on I started noticing her blood sugar levels slowly creeping up and up and decided it was time to program in a temp basal. For those of you not insulin pump savvy – a temp basal is a setting on the pump where you can temporarily increase the basal (or background) insulin for up to 24 hours at a time. We have ours set in percentages, so for instance: I set a 120% temp basal which means she was getting 20% extra basal insulin for the amount of time I had set. Numbers were still creeping though so I gave some correction insulin and changed the temp basal percentage up to 140%. She seemed to do okay with that amount until late Saturday and I cranked it up to 150% (so, again, this means she’s getting an extra 50% more basal insulin than usual). She was still running fairly high, but it was night time and I was afraid to push it up any more and it maybe be too much, so I jut did correction insulin every once in a while, as needed.
She also has asthma so any kind of cold almost always ends up in her chest and results in much more albuterol inhaler usage. Which also can sometimes contribute to higher blood sugars. Not to mention all the extra stress struggling to breath puts on her body. Fortunately by Monday she was starting to get better but still needed a lot of extra insulin and blood sugars were running in the 200-300’s with a few spikes into the 400’s. Remember, her “normal” range is supposed to be 100-150. We checked for ketones a couple of time a day and thankfully she never had even a trace of ketones. I did learn though that we need a bigger prescription for ketone test strips! We use a blood ketone meter and the strips are pretty expensive – about $60 for a box of 10 strips without insurance. We are fortunate that our insurance does cover them but we still have a $30 copay for up to 10 boxes at a time and we went through an entire box in the 4 days she was sick. Her current RX is just for 1 box a month, so with cold and flu season here and her propensity for catching everything that goes around we will be asking for the endo to write for at least 2-3 boxes a month for the next few months, at least.
Tuesday she was probably better enough to go back to school but she still had a slight cough and I was going to have to pull her out around 11:30 anyway to go to the CGM training so we just let her stay home. David called out of work that day too so he could also attend training and we just had a sort of laid back day. We ended up going to the movies and out for ice cream after training. It was interesting to watch the popcorn and ice cream in real time on her CGM. It was also blaringly obvious that we have been missing a LOT when it comes to the fluctuations in her blood sugar levels.
Then, on Thursday, I got hit with the cold Angelina had just gotten over. Luckily for David, he never caught it from either of us.
Chasing Lows 