I’m an adult with type 1…and I don’t even really freak out if I’m a little under 70’s in the mornings. Doesn’t happen a LOT but on occasion. Just eat, and adjust my bolus.
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This is one of those areas where there are as many opinions as there are people. On average, all else being equal, a nondiabetic, nonobese, nonpregnant person’s fasting BG will hover in the 80s somewhere. Now, the caveats:
- Nobody is is quite exactly “average”
- Approximately 58 zillion other variables can push that number around, e.g., exercise, illness, dehydration, phase of the moon . . .
- Often a doctor will tell a diabetic patient to keep it higher than that, especially if they are using insulin, from fear of lows; doctors’ opinions vary just like other people’s and medicine is not the exact science we like to think of it as—doctors basically spend their working lives chasing moving targets, something I could not do without going nuts
- Every physiology is individual; some people feel low (or high!) symptoms at widely differing levels
- Et cetera
So it’s a very individual thing. Personally the target I aim for is about 85. That works well for me and I have very few problem lows. Your results may vary.
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If your endo is any good they should understand getting to a pump is your goal and be totally supportive of moving you to carb counting as a necessary step in that direction. Given how motivated you are I should think your endo would be more than supportive–I think they’re much more used to people dragging their feet than otherwise. You can learn everything you need to know to do it yourself easily enough–it’s not that complicated–but the insurers all have their own hoops. In order to get authorized for a pump my insurance required my endo to certify that I had been carb counting on MDI for a certain period and Joslin required a pump-training class that included a mini-refresher on it.
In my case my endo also had to certify that I’d had a certain number of significant hypos in whatever the stated period was–30 days maybe? Wasn’t a terribly hard criterion to meet on basal-bolus MDI. There was a thread here in the last few months from someone who was being denied a pump because his control was too good, and that raised a lot of hackles. But it seemed like there was also an element of it being early days in his diagnosis and the insurers and medicos having their own one-size-fits-all template for progressing people through treatment regimes. Frustrating but I think if your endo supports you you should be able to get there, just takes some patience.
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