You Know What To Do

We visited the endocrinologist a couple of weeks ago.

My daughter's A1C was up a smidge, which isn't unusual at her end of summer visit. We do better keeping her blood sugar stable when her schedule is more predictable, as it is during the school year.

The numbers downloaded at the beginning of the visit from the pump and Dexcom covered the prior two weeks of blood sugars. One week was from vacation and the other was from the youth group mission trip. Both involved strange meals at strange times, late nights, periods of heavy activity at all different times of day and night, and at least during the second week, a few moments of stress.

There seemed to be a couple of patterns, but they could just have easily been a pattern of what happens when you follow a heavy, late lunch with a busy afternoon, an unusual dinner, a walk, and no 9 p.m. snack.

After talking things over, the endo said something like this:

Look- it looks like you need a little more insulin in a couple of different places here. You could tweak a couple of things now, like maybe this after-dinner spike, but maybe you don't want to do too much yet. Why don't you wait a week- get through band camp where you don't want a bunch of lows, and then once school starts look at these patterns again and make the adjustments. You know what to do. And hopefully by then you'll have the G6 which'll make it so much easier.

Band camp was, predictably, another week of unusual eating, busy schedule and extreme heat. It felt safer to run a little higher than what we'd ordinarily consider ideal.

School started last week with a weird schedule for the first day and an unexpected half day on day 2 due to a heat advisory, which was followed by a takeout lunch with friends. Friday night was the first marching band performance at the football game, preceded by a 4:30 p.m. dinner. This week will be slightly more predictable, so we'll see if some basal tweaks we made over the weekend make a difference. And we'll add more insulin for dinner. That was the one change we did make after the endo visit but it isn't doing the trick yet. No G6 yet either- more on that another day- but we've been managing T1D in a growing, changing child since long before any CGM at all.

We'll keep watching and adjusting. We know what to do.



via Adventures in Diabetes Parenting