Friday, April 15, 2011

Wouldn't Bet Money On It

Man.  Last night, we went out for our four year anniversary.  Just a nice dinner at a nice local Italian restaurant.  I ordered foods I thought were fairly easy to bolus for, and I had extra glucose tabs and starburst in my purse since I planned on getting some sort of pasta and bolusing generously for it.  My theory?  If I'm going to eat a high-carb meal (while pregnant) on a special occasion, I'd rather start to go low and have to snack/treat.  Much better than risking my blood sugar going high and spending an hour hour two trying to get back into range.  With the bolus I gave, I expected a decent post-meal number followed by a late evening of snacking on sugary things to keep from going low.

My body had other ideas.

Maybe it's because my blood sugar was going low when the meal began (so my body decided to throw some glucagon into the mix?), but Dexcom buzzed at me as we sat over our empty plates discussing some of our favorite Star Trek episodes (and some of our least favorite retcon moves in the Trek universe).  I pulled out Dex to see what he was telling me.  I was still at a decent number, but I had double arrows pointing up.  As I was confident I had enough sugar with me if things backfired, I bolused a little bit.

Repeat.

Repeat.

Repeat.

My blood sugar went over 200, despite a generous beginning bolus followed by several smaller boluses meant to try and keep things from getting any worse.  I did a little bouncing around in that range for a good hour or so... before double arrows pointing down.  I was prepared for this, though.  We were home by then, so I drank 25 carbs of juice, still ended up low, and topped myself off with four Starburst (17 carbs).

So, yeah, that didn't go quite as planned.

What frustrates me about this is that, pre-pregnancy, I don't think that would have happened.  I occasionally treated myself to properly-bolused servings of pasta, and the post-meal number was rarely a surprise.  But while pregnant, there's no telling how food will act in my system.  Even if I know the exact carb count in a food, and even if I ate the exact same meal yesterday, I wouldn't bet money on the outcome.  The best I've been able to do is avoid things that are really high fat or high carb, which is probably part of why everyone at my OB's office doesn't seem especially thrilled with my level of weight gain.

2 comments:

  1. I've been having the same problems, actually. I was just telling my husband today that it's like having to relearn living with diabetes - nothing is the same as it was before, and my predictive abilities are really hampered by all the irregular behavior...SO not what I want to be messing with during pregnancy.

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  2. Karen, exactly. And it might be even better if we were relearning diabetes all over again and it actually had a new pattern. But no. Random seems to be the name of the game. :(

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