Thursday, April 18, 2013

Skyline of Mountains

Wearing the CGM I have noticed something. I have noticed how much diabetes sucks. You see, when you check your blood sugar four, even ten times a day you can paint yourself a picture of what kind of day you had. You stayed below 10 (180) and you only went low once.  Or somedays, you laugh and say you're cured because you never went over a 7 (126). However, when you have this fancy machine called a CGM, you begin to realize that those days that you thought you were cured, you actually likely went high at 2:05 p.m or low at 4:16 a.m and if you were to draw out the picture of your blood sugars, like a CGM does on your insulin pump you would see what resembles a skyline of mountains.

I must admit, I love having the CGM to look at what my blood sugar is doing. In fact sometimes I get excited just to check it and wonder if I am obsessing over it too much. But,  I also think knowing too much isn't always a good thing.  I mean, it is good, don't get me wrong to be able to correct these hidden lows, make changes to basal rates, bolus ratios and to get an idea of what is going on when you are sleeping, working out or writing a stressful exam.  

On the other side I find it a little discouraging because I can watch at how 'unnormal' my body is.  How fast it goes up when I have a small piece of chocolate or how fast it plummets as I work out.  I look at the graph on my insulin pump and it is all over the place, not a straight line or something subtle, but all over the place.   At a time in my diabetes life that I feel like I have the most control, I look at my pump and think, what am I doing wrong? can I put any more effort into this? I am exhausted. 

When I think about how much work we, as diabetics have to put into managing our diabetes it makes me realize just how much of a full time job it is. We cannot do anything without consulting diabetes first to give us the go ahead and now with advanced technology such as CGM's are we feeling more freedom or more restriction knowing just how wonky our systems truly are.

For now, I am praising the CGM because I am fascinated by it's precision and ability. However, it does take me back thinking about all the times I wasn't wearing a CGM (pretty much all of my diabetes life) and what exactly was going on on days that I felt I was doing a good job.

Kayla

2 comments:

  1. I know exactly what you mean. Sarah had a CGM for awhile, and I remember going from seeing just nice low 100 bloodsugars at each check to realizing she was spiking well above 200 between those checks. It was super helpful in giving us more information and often we were able to curb the spike, but it also made me a bit more obsessed with her bg than I already was!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I can totally relate. Now that I'm off my CGM waiting for a new one, every time I check I think, "Ah, so what's it really doing..." I feel like I'm only getting half the story now! And I only wore it for a week! I'm going to be hopeless when it's more permanent :)
    Good luck!

    ReplyDelete