Diabetics - Don't Try This At Home...

So, I'm in a hurry to go to bed last night around 11 because I need to get up @ 5:30 to go speak in DC. So I take off the insulin pump, take off my clothes, put on what passes for pj's in my life, brush my teeth and go to bed. Notice the part where I didn't put my insulin pump back on? Yeah - neither did I.

I wake up at 3:30am, figuring I'm just nervous about oversleeping my early wake-up call. I go to the bathroom and go back at bed. I sleep fitfully, realizing I don't feel so hot. Nerves? Nah.

Around 4:30, I'm feeling really queasy and think - hell, am I getting a virus on a day I have to give a speech? No way! So I stand up to go to the bathroom again. When I do, I rub my belly because don't we all do that when we wake up in the middle of the night? It's at that time I realize my pump isn't plugged in.

I stagger into the bathroom and there it sits, dripping perfectly good insulin into the bathroom sink. I plug it back in - calculate how much insulin I didn't have for six hours and bolus for that.

One hour later, I wake up and hop in the car for three hours (another great way to raise my blood sugar), do the speech (which somehow went well), eat a big restaurant lunch (once again, bad) and three more hours in the car. All in all, I spent the better part of those 15 hours well above 300, which isn't common for me.

Finally, here I sit with the blood sugar safely down to 70. The possibility exists I poured through a slew of ketones during the day, but such is life. Drinking lots of fluids and being active over the next few days is my medicine of choice.

While I've forgotten a bolus here or there over the years, this was the first time I flat out forgot to wear my pump. All in all, not an experience I'd recommend.

Comments

  1. Anne Findlay8:33 PM

    man, that's pretty rough. but I think it's good to forget about being diabetic now and then. Not for 6 hours though. I'm glad things went okay and that you didn't have any serious problems.

    ReplyDelete

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