Does everybody who participated in the big feast last Thursday have their BGs back down? I don’t know if I do or not. For one thing, I’ve been doing my part getting rid of leftovers. For the other, my blood glucose has been in its “high” state for a few weeks now. So if I’m a bit high, I have no idea what to blame it on.
They seemed to be behaving a wee bit better yesterday. Maybe it was just on the agenda — or maybe it was because I’d finished up my part in getting rid of the corn casserole, the asparagus casserole, and most of the noodles, and moved on to the green beans and whatever was left of the turkey.
Then, this morning, I zipped up from the 120s to close to 200 on a small banana before the insulin took hold. Go figure.
It’s really annoying. And frustrating. It’s as though I’m insulin sensitive (relatively speaking) for a while, then become insulin resistant for a bit. Then back to sensitive, back to resistant, etc. I alternate between running low and high. There’s no rhyme or reason to it.
I thought I had it figured out recently, pinning it on a drug I take off and on for phantom pain. It seemed that, when I took the drug, my blood glucose ran low and, when I didn’t, it ran high. But I’ve been taking the medicine all along and my glucose switched from low to high. Scratch that theory!
Back in my younger days, I could count on my blood glucose dropping about one week out of the month. Good ol’ hormone fluctuations! Do you have hormone fluctuations after menopause? Is that what’s causing it?
Is it because I got a new pump? (It’s still awesome, by the way.) I need to (finally) come up with a set of basal rates for my high periods and another set for my low excursions. I love that today’s pumps let you do that.
I do need to send a couple of week’s worth of my numbers to my endocrinologist. He requested that…oh, three weeks or so ago. I’m not really good at writing all of that stuff down and had lost the transmitter to my continuous glucose monitor (CGM). However, I got my new monitor last Friday and fired it up on Sunday, so I can do a printout for him in a couple of weeks.
The new CGM is much better than my last one. Same manufacturer; next generation model. Mine is pink. I tried to take a picture of mine for you — lousy numbers and all — but it didn’t want its picture taken. Either there was a big glare on the screen or the screen would go blank just as the camera went off. Shy little thing. But you can see it here: www.dexcom.com.
It can be a colorful little thing, with graphs that turn red under 80 (which is where I have my “low” number set) and yellow over 180 (my “high” setting). I try to keep the graph a dull black.
Being able to see what your glucose is as often as every five minutes helps keep me on my toes when it comes to trying to control my Type 2 diabetes. (Frankly, you can never really control it. Diabetes sometimes has its own agenda. All we can do is the best we can.)
I need to send a note to my endocrinologist and ask if he has any ideas why I go from high to low and back again. And again. And again. Although, as I recall, he’s scratched his head over it, too.
Does anybody else out there experience this? Do you have any theories? Or even answers?
