Tonight was movie night. Usually we watch comedies or something light-hearted. Today we watched the movie 65.
All I knew was it was a jump-scare-type film. Movies like this have made my blood sugar go up in the past, so I decided to have a low-carb dinner and bolus a bit extra for the movie.
For dinner, I had veggie sausages that came to 6g of carbs, plus a small bowl of chips that was just over 10g of carbs. I also had about 13g of carbs in raw veg (cucumber, peppers, tomatoes and carrots). For this meal I would usually need about 3u of insulin; I did 4u.
I started the meal around 100 and stayed pretty flat until we started watching the movie. My blood sugar started rising right away, peaking at 150. I did .5u, took a break to do some dishes (that can usually stop a rise for me) and put on an extended bolus for 1u over the remaining hour of the movie. That brought me down to 110 and kept me steady.
I needed to have some extra carbs after the movie finished, but I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out, especially considering my past experiences watching stressful movies.
Do other people bolus for movies, or when they know they’re going to be in a stressful situation? Any tips for figuring out how much insulin you’d need to keep your blood sugar steady?
So what’s happening here is that your liver is dumping adrenaline and glucose into your blood stream and your sugar jumps up. However your liver will begin to remove it again and store it as glycogen. The reality is not exactly like that for me though. My doctors and diabetic educators tell me to never correct for these kinds of things. For me, when someone cuts me off in traffic or something like that, I get a spike. For me it does start to come down again but I just correct it maybe half of what I would normally and it seems fine.
Movies don’t really scare me because I guess I don’t feel like it’s real enough. I just watched that movie 65 on the airplane on my way home. The jump scares are kind of gratuitous.
I’ve experienced this before at work. I had one teammate who led a weekly meeting and it was always stressful. I would watch blood sugar shoot up when in meetings with them, but not in meetings they weren’t in. It was very clear they were the cause.
I was newly diagnosed then, on MDI and very sensitive to insulin (1u could bring my blood sugar down 80mg/dL), so I wasn’t giving many corrections outside of meals. I tried to go for a walk after those meetings to bring my levels back down. With stressful situations in the past, my blood sugar hasn’t come down on its own, so exercise or insulin in the only way to get it down.
Now I’ve got a pump and a bit more experience, so I’m trying to prevent those highs. I’m curious what others do and how they judge how much insulin is needed for situations like this.
A good thing with a movie bolus is it can easily be covered with movie snacks if the film doesn’t take my levels up as high as expected.
