Alright, I just did a pump download.
A quick overview has things looking rather good. Over the last two weeks I've had my glucose in range (between about 4.0 mmol/L and 8.0 mmol/L according to the Carelink reports) 49% of the time (compared to 38% when I last did a download). My high blood sugar readings were also down (48% of the readings compared to 55% last time). And I had less lows (3% compared to 6% last time). So yay! My average glucose is slightly lower as a result (8.3 compared to 8.9). My highest reading this week was down by 0.3, and my lowest reading was up by 0.2. So it looks like the spread of things was better overall. Oh, and it looks like on average I also had a 50/50 split between basal and bolus, which is great too (I'm pretty sure that's the split you should be aiming for).
I knew this was the case, but I've added in several more basal rates (two weeks ago I had 7 programmed into my pump; now there's 11). As I
mentioned earlier, I was actively making changes to my basal as I was running this sensor. Those changes were me adding in a couple of new basal rates in the hopes of stopping some lows that kept happening at various points during the day. Unfortunately I'm not sure if they've worked yet because the sensor ended (and I was too high during the last overnight I was running it to be able to tell).
I'd really like to print the sensor daily overlay out but I
forgot to get coloured ink so nothing's going to show up; let's see if I can just puzzle through it while it's on the computer...
The thing that jumps out at me right off the bat is that I suck at carb counting from dinner time into the evening. Actually, that's not altogether fair. It looks like I just need to be more careful when eating things like pizza or deep-fried
fish. I forgot to do a dual wave last night while eating pizza, which
meant I had to deal with being high all night. Prior to that (on the
29th) I went out with friends for fish and chips; I thought I had carb
counted reasonably well (I found the nutritional information online) but
I went high anyway,
exactly the way I went high with the pizza:
my glucose started coming down, then shot up super fast. I'm thinking
that if I'd done the dual wave, I would have been able to stop that from
happening.
Other than these instances, my evenings were looking relatively okay. I had one night where I highly underestimated the carbs in the dinner I made. And another day that I purposely spiked my glucose so I could go swimming. I'm not sure what happened on the 30th, but it looks like I spiked my glucose because I went low repeatedly while at work (on days where I keep going low, I eventually get mad and eat a bunch of things to spike my glucose - not exactly the best plan, but it deals with the low problem). So yeah, my carb counting isn't horrible. I just happened to capture a bad week with my sensor.
The sad thing about the pizza last night is that I did do a dual wave
originally. But I ate a bit more pizza about an hour later and totally
forgot to do it then. :( I also ate a poutine earlier in the day (I know, I
know, I ate terribly
yesterday) which I had the nutritional information for; I used a dual
wave and my glucose behaved beautifully! What's nice about seeing that
in action is that I know the half hour delay for the squared wave of the
dual looks like it works quite nicely.
I'd like to make note of the beautiful correction I saw this morning at about 9am. I was still battling the highs from the pizza. I tried correcting it at about 3am but the correction failed and I'm not sure why. But at 9am the correction worked beautifully. I was considering changing my insulin sensitivity settings on my pump over this (for 2am/3am), but I see that I made a correction around 2am the day before and that one worked just fine. So I'm not going to mess with the sensitivity over this.
I found a dip
around 9pm in my glucose that I can't tell what's causing it (it could
be my insulin to carb ratio, but it might also be the basal); I'd really
like to see more of what's going on before attempting to mess with
anything to fix that. I'd love to run another sensor like right now but it's too late to start one before I go to sleep (I don't want to have to stay up to do the initial calibration). I think I'm going to wait until Tuesday though before running another one; that way I'll catch a couple of 7 hour work days and a couple of days off to hopefully get a better picture of what's going on.
