So I’ve always heard stress can raise your BG. Heck, even my dentist brings it up when I have to have a “procedure.” And I always said, nah, not really a problem, at least I never noticed it being one.
But then I got me a CGM…
Background
1: The last couple of days have been exceedingly stressful at work as I crank through one of the annual tasks that I feel the least confident about, and that my boss makes the biggest stink about (and believe me, she can make a very painful stink).
2: Back in April I got a CGM to help with managing time-zone changes for a trip to France. Since then I’ve been paying a lot more attention to post-prandial spikes and whatnot, trying to learn the technique of pre-bolusing sufficiently to control them, particularly at lunch time which is the one meal where I usually indulge in a few carbs.
These things came together yesterday in a way that really opened my eyes. I was busting my butt on this report I have to get out, deep under the gun, when my pre-bolus reminder came up. Went through the routine–I find unless I’m below 120 I have to give it quite a bit of lead time in order for the down trend to get going before I actually eat. So I bolused at 11 for the expected carbs, noticing that my BG was riding kind of high compared to normal at this time–like 140 or so. Meanwhile, I go in for my first meeting with my boss to go over my spreadsheet, and it turned up a bunch of problems (she has a laser eye for this stuff, which I do not). So I dived back into it for the next hour, keeping an eye on my CGM for the down curve to start. By 1 pm, I’m still waiting. In fact, even though I’ve bolused like 8 units two hours earlier, it’s still edging UP.
In fact I kept working to fix the problems in my report and never actually ate lunch. BG finally started to turn around later in the afternoon, and by the time I got home for dinner around 6 it was an unremarkable 90. But that 8 units I’d taken at noon basically did nothing but keep the stress effect in some kind of check. I can only imagine how high I would have gone without it (I think I peaked about 170)—but I’m fairly gobsmacked to have had that much IOB without eating and ending up just in normal range hours later. Without the CGM I probably wouldn’t have skipped eating (would have been afraid to, not that doing so was a good thing particularly) and I probably would have ended up with a pretty high number pre-dinner probably without any clear idea why (miscalculated the bolus maybe). Having the CGM data going the whole time really was like lifting the veil–stuff that’s probably been going on all along but I never was really aware of it.