We got through our first full night with no BG issues, at long last. No bubbles, no crimped infusion lines (that’s happened a couple of times), no inadvertent overdoses of insulin, and no “Mommy, look, I’m SHARING my chocolate milk with Eric!” episodes. He woke up this morning with a BG of 183, not bad at all–a wee bit higher than I want but a small adjustment to his basal rate so that it bumps up at 3:00 a.m. instead of 4:00 a.m. should help with that. So here’s hoping we can finally put the road bumps behind us and get on with it!
Oh, and in case anyone’s wondering, the problem clearly was the reservoir. We’ve had no bubbles, none, since we switched to a different lot of reservoirs.
Glad you got the reservoir issue straightened out.
Does he usually have high bg in the morning? Do you understand how the Dawn Phenomenon (DP) usually causes that?
He may need a fairly large dosage increase at 4:00 AM or such. Whether or not it should be moved to 3:00 AM is another question entirely, but for me it wouldn’t be a good idea. The body normally increases insulin resistance around 4:00 AM, though YMMV is a big factor here as everywhere, and he likely needs to wait until 4 to line up with DP. That prepares him for the above and the surge in bg levels when he gets vertical. With the release of glycogen when he climbs out of bed he’ll need more insulin anyway, and likely will until breakfast has been taken care of. This may or may not extend partway through the morning, but that needs to be determined by experiment for a while.
No, more normally he’s low in the morning — numbers in the 80s to the low 100s are pretty standard. I know about Dawn Phenomenon but his endo says it will be a while before that’s an issue for him, and we still think his pancreas has a little bit of function left because we periodically get honeymoon-style lows. I think we were just a bit too conservative with the basal rate with the second startup.
