Wednesday, January 25, 2006

Up and up and up!

I've been exercising regularly. I've been trying (please not the word trying) to eat less sweets. And I have been checking my basal rate like a mad woman. But the dawn phenomenon seems to have attacked with a vengeance.

For the past week my morning blood sugars, and now my morning basal rate, have just gone up and up and up. This is one of the first times that this has happened and I haven't gotten angry about it. Angry hasn't helped before and I'm tired of getting angry every time my blood sugar goes through either an up swing (and then back down) or has just gone up and I've had to adjust my rates for the long term.

I just don't want to worry about eating a bowl of Kashi Go Lean Crunch in the morning. I want to just say "hey, I'm hungry. I'm going to eat a very healthy breakfast and bolus correctly and in two hours I'll be in range!" Currently it's more like "well, I'll have a little piece of toast and over bolus and in two hours I may still be over 140..."

So I'm working on fixing that. But I'm not angry about it this time. I just want to "fix" it!

On a different note, I talked to my diabetes educator about the different reservoirs for my minimed pump. We decided to stick with the current infusion set/reservoir through minimed since I have such good luck with them and to save money I'm canceling the automatic delivery through minimed. It was set up automatically when I got the pump and since then I've just been getting more and more, since I only switch every 4 days. So now I have about 10 months of supplies just sitting at my house, waiting. So I can save some money this way.

4 Comments:

At 8:12 AM, Blogger Kerri. said...

Tek,

I had a serious infestation of Dawn Phenomenon critters two years ago. It's one of the reasons I went on the pump in the first place. My basals are 0.4 all day long, except for this enormous spike to 0.85 (double!) from 5am - 9:30 am. I was waking up with bloodsugars of 89 mg/dl and ending up at 274 mg/dl by the time I got to my desk at work -- after eating NOTHING. It was extremely frustrating. And to get the right morning increase, I had to experiment with fasting and different basals. That, too, was frustrating.

Silver Lining Moment: It worked, though. And now that I have the right basals, there's less chaos in the morning.

Good luck and let me know if there is anything I can do to help!

Kerri.

 
At 1:31 PM, Blogger Tekakwitha said...

Thanks Kerri

I had pretty good luck this morning. My morning basal went from .1 to .3 so far. But my blood sugars were doing the same thing yours were, great upon waking up and then in teh 200+ when I got to work, after not eating.

Thanks!
tek

 
At 11:14 AM, Blogger Sandra Miller said...

T-

Hope you're having some luck figuring out these morning spikes.

Joseph's morning bgs seem to consistently spike 2 hours after eating, but get back in range by 4 hours.

Lately, (like you) we've found that aggressive basal increases in the morning are starting to smooth some of these spikes. Initially we thought that higher carb boluses were necessary-- those, however, would only yield lows by lunch time.

Trying to do fasting basal tests during the day has been next to impossible, (unless Joseph sleeps in on the weekends-- that's when I first realized we were dealing with a basal issue).

We're still tweaking, as it seems that what works one week is suddenly not enough the next week... I'm thinking this might be the whole honeymoon effect. You just never know when that pancreas is going to contribute something...

Ah well, good luck with your detective work.


Sandra

 
At 4:50 PM, Blogger HVS said...

Hi,
Are you in Honeymoon?Those are pretty low basals..
Cool Blog. If you want to add me- its d-logger.blogspot.com
-Heidi(another 24 yo type 1)

 

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