November 21, 2011

Rough Nights - 30 Health Post in 30 Days

So there are times when I just have a rough day with diabetes.  My blood sugar won't go up, my blood sugar won't go down, it keeps going up and down, my pump ran out of insulin, the pump is alarming for highs, lows, weak signals, low battery, the list goes on and on.  Diabetes issues don't tend to take a break when night time comes along.  Let me give you an example of a really rough night...
10pm:  Getting read to go to bed, pump alarms saying that insulin is running low.  Shut it off figuring that I have enough insulin to get me through the night.
11:00:  Crawled into bed.  Pump alarms that my blood sugar is going low.  Get out of bed and eat something.
11:15:  back into bed.
11:30:  Alarm telling me that the CGM needs to be changed.  Get up and change the CGM.  Note that I will be woken up in two hours to calibrate (testing your blood sugar and entering it into the pump so that the CGM has a number to go off of to convert the number it is getting from the fluid in my body into what my blood sugar level is).
12am:  Back into bed.
2am:  Alarm telling me to test my blood sugar so that I can calibrate the CGM.  Test my sugar, it is high, calibrate and give myself insulin.
2:30:  Alarm telling my my blood sugar is high.
3:30:  Alarm telling me that I've run out of insulin.  Get up, change my pump set and fill pump with more insulin.
3:45: back into bed.
4:30:  Alarm that my blood sugar is low.  Get out of bed, eat something.
5am:  Back into bed.
7:30-8am:  Phone alarms start going off telling me that it is time to get up to go to work.
8am:  Last wake up alarm goes off...in my daze of sleepiness I turn off the last alarm and fall right back to sleep.
10am.  Wake up panicked because I am now an hour late to work.
11am:  Show up to work 2 hours late.  Good thing my boss loves me!

Granted, this doesn't happen all the time but all of these things can happen during the night and do, sometimes just a few, sometimes none and sometimes all.  At this point my body has learned to sleep through my pump alarms for the most part, so instead I wake up with the battery on my pump dead because it has been singing to me all night!

This post was written as part of NHBPM – 30 health posts in 30 days: http://bit.ly/vU0g9J

2 comments:

Natalie Smith said...

that is horrible. no fun.

Lisa said...

LOL!! When I'm around u get kicked all night whenever ur alarms r going off! Wow! Aren't u lucky? So when I'm having a sleepover with u I get those same wake up times! I can attest...very sleepless nights! Mine are about to start...next Tuesday night!