I’ve had type 1 for 16 years, pretty good control with tandem and Dexcom, but for the past three months I’ve had what seems like episodic insulin resistance where my Bg rises to around 250—no matter what I eat, if I don’t eat, if I give myself “ghost” blouses—for hours every day. I’m currently being evaluated for pheochromocytoma, a neuroendocrine tumor that intermittently releases glucose into the blood stream. I’m hesitant to change my timed pump settings because it doesn’t start or end at the same time. Exercise helps, but with how sick I am otherwise it’s not always an option. A1c last week was 6.8, so not awful, but these persistent highs make me feel so sick and tired and I definitely feel some treatment fatigue. On waitlist to see an endo. Any tips???
That sounds awful. Afreeza could help when your BG is high and you just want to get it down without a long tail of insulin. It won’t really solve your situation, but it might help a little on the margins. I use it very occasionally in addition to my Tandem pump (not instead of it at all).
Tandem has multiple set ups. I suggest setting up a hyper aggressive mode, for when it occurs, and then slip into that mode and go manual. Then back out when the symptoms subside. Not ideal, but a good solution.
Can you boost your basal? When my bg’s are running high for a couple days with no explanation I find that it’s time to quit doing rage boluses and instead up my basal a lot.
Then all of a sudden with no explanation everything goes back to normal.
One of my most severe insulin-needs-boost was Lyme disease. Any infection can do it and the way medicine is balkanized today I’m not sure an endo would start looking for infection-induced changes in insulin need.
Not knowing your TDD or TDD history it’s hard to call it “insulin resistance” IMHO.
Wow I’ve never even heard of afrezza! I’m seeing my PCP tomorrow and can ask him if that’s something he can prescribe. Thank you!!
This is what I’ve been leaning toward! I already have a more aggressive setup for when I take cold medicine, I can try that today and go from there. Thank you!
Rage bolus made me laugh, that’s definitely what they are I’m going to try a new profile today and see what happens, I’ve just been putting it off because when these episodes end I can go low pretty easily. But I’d rather one low to several hours of being high.
I agree about not being sure if it’s insulin resistance, honestly I’ve just been reading a lot of literature on pheochromocytoma and that’s how they describe it. I’m sorry to hear you went through something similar with Lyme! The doctors are all treating my Bg as a secondary issue to the rest of my symptoms but I think they just don’t realize how sick highs make you feel. Or how scary it is to feel like insulin no longer works.
Metformin is a type 2 drug that might help you. It works for some type 1 fight the predawn effect by suppressing your livers dump of glucose in the pre dawn hours.
I actually tried it to reduce my daily insulin, but it didn’t do much for that, but it did flatten out my sleep levels.
It might be a solution for you because I also reduces your insulin resistance