The carb terrorist is slain

I've decided that enough is enough.  I have to cut back on carb intake.  This is ridiculous.  Ridiculous, I say.  So no more cereal at breakfast.  Goodbye Two-Scoops; farewell Mini-Wheats; and auf wiedersehen Vector.  Even good ol' meal-replacement-12-grams-of-protein Vector. My breakfast ratios used to be 10:1 and they are now 3:1.  That means that I used to take 7 units of insulin for my 70 g of carbs in my delicious bowl of Two-Scoops... now when I entered 70g of carbs it would show that it wants to give me something like 27.8 u of insulin but it would beep at me: MAX BOLUS EXCEEDED.  So it could only give me the 25 u, then I would have to remember to manually enter in the rest of the units.  That sounds excessive right?  And then I would still spike from 7 to 12.5 then come down within an hour or so, some times even having a low.

I tried everything: dual-wave, regular, square, triangle... okay not triangle, but if that option would have been there I would have tried it.  Nothing would keep me stable if I had cereal.  I love cereal which will be hard to cut out completely.  But what happened over the weekend actually prompted this re-evaluation.

So on my way in to work on Friday at noon I stopped by my pharmacy and picked up four sensors.  I brought them into the office fully intending to put one on right away.  Work got in the way and I forgot all about them under my desk.  I went home at 8 pm after we closed up the bank and finished packing for our weekend visit to my parents who live outta town.  As we were loading the duffel bags in the car and situating Noah in his car seat, I remembered my sensors were under my desk at work.  The bank had long been closed up for the night and so I just decided I'll have to test a lot more this weekend.

Well things were going okay with that and I had really good numbers all of Saturday.  I was visiting my friend Andra and her new baby boy Anthony.  I was "good" all day.  Then in the evening my pump was beeping that I was low on insulin and I decided that I would change my reservoir and my infusion set before bed.  I was being proactive and I was proud of myself.  Some times I would risk it and go to sleep, fingers crossed, that I would not get the awful NO DELIVERY alert in the middle of the night.  So I diligently filled up a new reservoir and primed the pump.  Then went to sleep. 

I woke up in the morning to hear Noah playing downstairs with his grandparents.  I woke up and made my way down the stairs.  Noah was very excited to see me and wanted to have cereal with Mamma.  I grabbed a bowl, the box of Mini-Wheats and a banana.  I poured the cereal and the milk, cut up the banana and Noah jumped up on my lap.  I was having a lively conversation with my parents in between bites.  They were enjoying their coffee and Noah was enjoying being surrounded by loving family.

Then, all of a sudden, I hear the distinctive beep beep beep.  I thought "What does it want now?  There is no way I am low on insulin since I just "did my insulin" last night."  I unclipped my pump off the back of my PJ pants and the pump read, "CONTINUE PRIMING".  I couldn't believe it!  I had not pressed ACT after I finished priming last night.  So my pump was in SUSPEND all night long.  I quickly handed my toddler over to my mom and raced (as fast as a pregnant mamma can go) to the guest bedroom to test and take insulin.  The whole time I'm thinking, "I should have tested before the cereal.  Idiot!"  The tester read 23.  I pressed all the buttons as quickly as I could as to get insulin in me as fast as possible.  I knew it was too late and I would spike EVEN HIGHER because of the cereal.


23 is high.  Really high.  I was worried and anxious and felt like a terrible person. 

Sure enough over the next hour I watched my number spike all the way up to 27.   I was feeling so awful, physically and emotionally.  I kept worrying about Nr. 2.  How could I do this? 27 is so disgustingly high.  Saying I was worried, is an understatement.  I was livid.  Angry and ashamed of my behavior.  I know it was an honest mistake but still if I would have been more proactive with my sensors the CGM would have prevented this. That alert would have beeped and beeped at me in the crazy "the bomb is about to detonate" way and I would have woken up.

I tested every 15-20 min.  Slowly my number were down to 22, then 18 then 13.  By 2pm I was within range (in the 5s and 6s) but the experience was awful.  I feel like a terrible mom.  Like dropping a baby or losing a toddler in a department store.  Maybe those are extreme but still I felt something close to that.  Sheer regret.  I couldn't do anything to undo it.  But I did decide to learn from it.

So for the past two morning Noah and I had eggies for breakfast.  Noah loves it too. He is a big fan of cereal just like his mamma.  But he also loves eggies.  He loves to help mamma "crack the eggie, crack, crack" (he sings a little song with it) and I love the stable - beautifully stable - sugars.