I love it when this happens
I’ve been struggling for the last 2-3 weeks with insistent lows in the midnight to three a.m. period. These were not ordinary lows. They resisted repeated glucose tab treatments and endured up to two hours. I wrote about them in another thread. This was really eroding my quality of life as I wasn’t getting my needed sleep.
Here’s one sample, but I experienced many nights with this problem:
Since they didn’t respond typically to quick acting glucose, I considered other possible explanations. I thought, perhaps, that my digestion problems stopped the glucose from quickly reaching my digestive tract where they could be absorbed and drive my BG back up. I also thought that perhaps my liver was losing its ability to put out a stream of glycogen, kind of like the vacation it takes when it metabolizes of few glasses of wine.
Well, those were nice theories but the real explanation was the simplest one. Occam’s Razor wins again! When I finally started ratcheting down my 9 p.m. to midnight basal rate all the way from 0.6 units/hour down to 0.2 units/hour, the problem started to melt.
Yesterday’s CGM trace washed over me with welcome relief:
Why do things make much more sense when looking back on them and seem so confusing when considered from the chaos of the moment?
Sometimes I need to be reminded to grant much more weight to the simplest explanation with the fewest assumptions. Occam was right.
ps - The graphs were produced by the new Dexcom Clarity web-based analysis software.