Dead Tired

Two nights ago, my husband reached over in the dark and tapped my hand. My Pebble watch was vibrating that it was time for a glucose check. I didn't respond. He tried tapping my shoulder. Nothing. Alarmed now, he started shaking the top of my head. He was thinking, "Oh, God, please she didn't just die and leave me with all of this to manage." I finally woke and half awake, stumbled out of bed to go check William who had thought it was a good idea to have a midnight snack and had been a bit high at bedtime, gave himself insulin (too much, too little?) before he fell asleep.

The next morning when my husband told me his panic in the night, I laughed. I told him I'd hoped he'd miss me a little for myself and not just that he'd now have to manage all this alone. Of course he agreed that he surely would.

I was just really, really tired. Lately, the light vibration of the watch doesn't wake me. Two nights ago, I missed the alarm, but later, randomly woke up to find William had been low for two hours. Guilt set in. He was 55 mg/dL when I tested and the graph showed he'd been lower. Possibly, that was a false compression reading, but I'll not know since I missed the alarm.

It doesn't happen often, but that is the fear T1D parents carry - that it will be their fault if something bad happens. Often, parents are told to run BG higher at night to preserve their own sleep and to give more of a cushion from serious lows. Eventually, the artificial pancreas will replace pumps and nighttime lows will become more of a rarity.

As we work for tighter control, William doesn't feel his lows as much and likes to be in the 70s and 80s. This is where he says he feels good. The difficulty is that 70 isn't that far from the 50s and 60s, where I don't want him to stay for long. It takes vigilance (and a great deal of nerve) to let him stay there. Sometimes, we have to ignore the number and go with how he feels.

Notes:
I re-wrote the basal program to avoid lows in the morning. I was successful, sort of, as he was 186 when he woke up. Back to the drawing board.

I'm almost done with my Coursera course "Gut Check: Exploring Your Microbiome". Next on the docket is a course about Type 2 Diabetes since I certainly have the genes for it.