Midnight (ok, 3 am) madness

I'm turning into the person who turns off her alarm clock, rolls over, and forgets about going to work until 10 am.

Except that's what I'm doing with my pump alarms.

My sensor settings are set quite tight, so I deal with a fair number of alarms during the day. At night, when I hear the alarm I wake up, I deal with my blood sugar, I go back to sleep. At least I think I do.

What sometimes happens is that I wake up, I fall back to sleep and I DREAM that I've dealt with my blood sugar. Then I wake up low.

Yikes!

In an effort to outsmart my sleeping self, I now wear tight shirts to bed, stick the pump under the shoulder part of the shirt, and voila - annoying pump alarming next to my ear to wake me up.

Except last night, my site came out as I slept. Without a sensor, I would have woken up vomiting and in DKA. Fun all around. With the sensor, I finally woke to my blood sugar creeping up. Luckily, the site had only been out for about an hour - according to my blood sugar records.

This has never happened before. I suspect that while I vigorously returned the heavy covers to dd, my pump slipped from my shirt and I threw it over dd. She moved, and the site pulled out.

Or did it?

Other option: I knew that I needed to change my site this morning. I set out everything to do it before I went to sleep, so I would remember in the morning (today was a busy day). Could I have possible tried to change my site in my sleep...and woken to a site removed?

Yikes.

Ok, I'm switching my site-changing time to right before dinner. Next step in my plan to outwit myself.

Eyeballs from outer space

I rarely feel like a freak because of my diabetes. Not that people don't notice the pump - they just think it's a pager/mp3 player with a cool cord.

But dd is in preschool now, and as a parent in a participation preschool, they needed my medical info too.

So what will happen if you have a problem with your diabetes?

Well, I don't know. I have never been so out of it that I've passed out...or couldn't help myself. But if I sit and stare at the wall for a while or fall to the floor, um...check to see if I respond, then call 911.

That's what's on the preschool wall chart. Might sit and stare at wall. And everyone gets to see it all of the time. Freakity freak freak.

Of course, I might just sit and stare at the wall on a tired day, just to see what everyone does. Grin.

Things I've been thinking about

Ok, so maybe I do need to blog after all.

Things I have been working on:
Actually hearing the bleeping (literally bleeping) sensor when I'm asleep. If I can't hear the low alarm, what's the point of the sensor system?

If my pump is in my pocket or in the bed, there is NO WAY I can hear it.

Now I sleep on my back with the pump tucked into a shirt, close to my shoulder and close to my ear. It still catches the signal from the sensor on my thigh, but it's close enough to my ear that I can hear it at night.

The weird things we do.

On another note:
Yesterday dd and I were playing "hospital" in the front area. Well, I was unwillingly being forced into playing hospital, more like it.

Her pump broke.

You see, I've always told dd that she has a pump inside her. My pump inside me doesn't work, so I have a pump outside me.

So she had to go to the hospital and have a poke, and then we decided that she needed a pump outside her. Much was made of the potential colour of the pump, and she finally decided that if it couldn't be green or red it was going to be purple.

And so goes our odd world we've created.

Pizza - will it come back to bite me?

Corny, corny.

After three years of random acts of pizza and regret, I think...I hope...that I may have learned how to live with pizza at dinner time.

This summer, we visited friends and got pizza for dinner. It was GOOD pizza. I can't eat 1 slice of good pizza. That is pizza torture. I have to eat at least two slices, maybe three. But I am afraid. Afraid of the evils of the low blood sugar right after eating, afraid of the great sneaky rise in blood sugar in the wee hours of the morning.

My official sources tell me that pizza slices have 25-35 carbs per slices. That is hooey. So I bolused 40-50 grams per slices, with a grand total of 150 grams of carbs for the meal. Ack!

I usually divide my dinner insulin 50/50 over three hours in a dual wave bolus. This is one of the reasons I need a pump - to make sure I don't go crushingly low right after dinner.

So for pizza, I divided it by 35/65 over four hours, corrected a little at two hours, and sailed through the night with a minor correction at 3 am.

Repeatable?

I did repeat it once again over the summer, to similar success. Now, 150g of carbs is still a whack-o-carbs to be going to bed on. I wouldn't do it without my sensor to guide me and warn me to pending lows. But it did work - twice - and I am considering eating pizza again.

Now ain't that a radical thought?

Lonely, so lonely

Yep, my blog was lonely for a good long time. In fact, I abandoned it. But popular demand (ok, two people asking) has led to the rebirth of the blog. I don't promise any wildly great writing, though, ok?

So the marathon went...slowly! Don't ask. It was wet, it was cold, it was very wet and very cold. But people who do slow marathons are oh so cool. I chatted with a lot of people, including one woman from Iceland who said that Team Diabetes folk always inspire her. According to her, we're real people who run, not good runners, but just people. Who run. Yep, that's me.

Finishing the marathon - I was elated, but sadly my finishing pics don't show that. I didn't see the camera until it was too late. My favourite one was taken in my sexy garbage bag (rain gear) with dd. She missed my finish - she'd been waiting for 20 minutes for me, and she needed to pee. Sigh. After the marathon we partied hard for two hours on the streets, going around to all of the different artsy culture night street events. Then we collapsed, very, very tired.

So now I'm back. I did the Coho Run in September in a rather decent time for me, 1:22 for 14 km. I've slacked off the last couple of weeks, and I need to get those long runs in on the weekends. I'm attempting to work biking and swimming into the program, but the swimming freaks me out. I love, love, love swimming. I have to take off my pump to do it, though, and that makes me a tad neurotic. And the only time I can swim is after dd is asleep, which means that I swim while dinner time insulin is still in my system. Which means that I am going to have to drink a bleeping great lot of juice just to go for a swim, then get neurotic that I'm still going to go low. Loads of fun. Wonder why I am less than motivated.

My current thought: eggs for dinner. Every Tuesday we will eat low carb omlettes. Then I will have almost no insulin going on from dinner, and so I will have to drink less juice, and life will be happpppppeeeeee. Right? Hmmmmmm.

See, no one should have invited me back to this here blogosphere again. Ranty ranty rant.

Grin.

Good night.

Creative commuting

Ah, the snow, the ice, the dark. Winter. Luckily, I got some ice grippers for my shoes for Christmas. It would not be a good thing to run or walk along and thwack myself on the head.

I'm having to get creative to find time to run when it isn't dark, and I'm enjoying running as a form of creative commuting these days. Last week, I ran with the jogging stroller to our local shopping strip to bring some children's clothes in for consignment. On the weekend, I ran down through our suburban streets into a local forest, down a long gravel road, through a cemetery to a meeting on sustainability in our community. I thought that it was a great fit all around. Nutty running through snow person meets sustainable commuter.

And you know what? It often takes less time than the bus....