Diabetes Awareness Month, Day 29

Today was the day I rage suspended. Yep, I’ve created a new diabetes term of endearment. Rage suspend is the opposite of rage bolus. It means cutting out insulin completely and for longer than one hour after relenting lows in an angry attempt to stabilize BG. It usually results in high BG a few hours afterwards.

We’ve had a few days on a low side. V has been complaining of some mild GI symptoms – tummy aches here and there, no appetite, feeling tired. When my child is not hungry you KNOW something is wrong. She is always hungry. And when she has any kind of GI upset her BG tends to crash hard. This time BG lows are mild and protracting, just like her GI symptoms. She’s been hovering around 60s and 70s, with a couple of dips into 50s and 40s. We’ve been having great difficulty bringing her above 90. We had her sip on Sprite quite a bit. Today Dexcom would.not.shut.up. It kept alerting and alerting and alerting. It’s set to alert at 75 so that we can be proactive about lows, even though we are perfectly comfortable letting her ride out the 70s as she feels quite good in the 70s range. But today she was dipping in and out of 70s so much, and Dexcom kept thinking she was mostly in the 60s. We made her drink more Sprite and eat more food. Good luck forcing food down V’s throat when she’s not hungry because she’s not feeling well. At around 4 PM I forced her to take a couple more bites and cried uncle. We suspended insulin delivery for 1 hr. After one hour was over she was still hovering in low 70s so I said what the hell, and suspended for another hour. BG finally started to climb up. So I guess mission accomplished? Except she’s still climbing up, 184 as of this exact moment. But I’m reluctant to give her insulin because I don’t want her to crash at night. Again. (Did I mention she was 40 last night at 11 PM?) Stupid diabetes. Damn if you do, damn if you don’t.