The Diabetes Elevator

We have frequent flyer miles on the Diabetes Roller Coaster. Some days our blood sugar numbers fly all over the place with no rhyme or reason. Up, down, around and through tunnels of confusion we ride the coaster until one, or even all of us, just wants to throw up! Generally, we hold on tight and try to control the ride as much as possible. We try to make the steep ride up not too chilling and the drops not too frightening. We try to mold it into more of baby roller coaster. Like the kinds that they have at the county fair or at Toon Town in Disney Land.

But lately, our little L has been riding the Diabetes Elevator. His blood sugars will slowly begin to go up and, even with a correction, he’ll continue to creep up more. Kind of like, you pushed the button and now it has to go up, no matter how much you want it to go down! Slow and steady, annoying elevator music in my brain included.

When we finally get his numbers to start to go down it takes FOREVER! The elevator doors open and close painfully slow; it lets other people on, AND THEN...slowly... floor by floor, it makes its descent. It’s been a few days now and all I can say is “Get us off this elevator from hell!” I can only assume his correction ratio needs tweaking and I’ll be calling my endo and working out a plan today. But the reason I haven’t jumped on this sooner is that B has been having the same problem at night too. Between 9 and 1am they both rise, corrections and all. (After 1:00am, B’s sugars will sweetly obey the correction while L patiently rides that elevator down.) We first had to go through all the different scenarios:
Is the insulin bad?
Were the sets inserted wonky?
Have we been feeding them foods that won’t cooperate with bedtime basals?
We’ve been using the recalled sets for so long, now that we are using the new ones do they operate differently?

No, after 4 days of this, and many set changes, it seems that they are BOTH undergoing growth sprits, or some kind of change requiring basal changes and so forth. J has been my constant. His blood sugars have been a-ok.

When you have one child who is REALLY high and the other two are in range it takes the sting out a little. You can put feelings of despair aside and help the high child as much as possible. It sucks for sure, but you can’t get down too much because, look, the two others are ok...I’m not a COMPLETE failure or anything.

But when TWO are high…and one of the nights ALL THREE WERE SUPER HIGH…It makes me feel, well, I can’t really write it without swearing, but I’m sure you can just imagine.

Anyway, we’ll figure it out. We always do. I’m just sucking at being a pancreas this week and wanted to put out there that I officially hate elevators now…and roller coasters for that matter.