Samantha, I'm so sorry that you're having such a rough time. Adding the flu to anything makes everything feel much worse!
Does your hospital have a Diabetes Center? If they do, can you call them and ask to speak to a CDE--a diabetes educator? Maybe they can give you some help over the telephone so that you can get your BG to calm down.
If that's not an option and your BG continues to be super high, please consider going to Emergency. Ask them to put you on IV insulin so that they and you can monitor your BG coming down slowly without fearing a nasty hypo. You won't have to worry about stacking insulin or other problems and it shouldn't take a long time to bring your BG down. Take your meter with you and monitor yourself, testing every 20-30 minutes. If you can stay there for a couple of hours after the BG comes down, you can be sure that it's not going to elevate dramatically again.
If I were you, I'd avoid eating very much so that you don't need to bolus to cover food. Drink lots of water or clear tea. Nothing with sugar in it. You want your basal rate to be steady for awhile before you take in much carbohydrate.
Take a book with you. They should be able to give you this kind of treatment sitting in a chair.
I would add to what have been said before that you have to study yourself. I warn you, it takes time. YOu have to know how do you react to high sugar as well as to low sugar. Not everybody react the same way. You have to learn also how you react to differents types of carbs...and if you haven't learned yet how to count carbs, it could be a good moment to start. Food it is very very important.If you can control your food (and by control I mean to know how many carbs do you eat) you are half way there...I hope I have helped you...
I would recommend you get back on the pump, and test more than 8 times a day. I test 12-16 times a day, and look at the bigger picture of my blood sugars weekly
Im using http://www.glooko.com/ to upload my readings from my device to my iphone. If you get it let me know, i made an app that will take those readings and graph them.
But keep eating healthy, try being active, even just going for a walk once a day, and never give up :).
I don't think you sound like a hypochondriac either. High BG will mess you up. My plan is to test a lot. I also cheat by eating pretty lightly during the week. Part of this is b/c I've had some success losing weight (peak of 275, now 180ish...) and am now sort of vain about it. Sure it's horrible, venal, whatever. Eating less food for breakfast and lunch, at least 5 days/ week (when I'm at work...) give me pretty regular habits and I try to skew things towards healthy because it makes me feel better when I push myself when I'm working out. If you have say cereal for breakfast, get up 5 minutes earlier and have eggs for a few days. Very minimal carb load and you can liven them up with salt, pepper, maybe butter although I don't like that as I'm sort of prone to scorching it when I'm a zombie at 6:30 AM. If it helps for a couple of days, you'll have figured something out and can figure other stuff out next? Improving even one "meal" at a time is a great way to make progress towards figuring stuff out and getting control of it and probably feeling quite a bit better?
As far as testing, I came up with:
1) wake up, test bg 2) before eating test BG
3) before driving to work test bg
4) 2 hours after eating test bg
5) lunch test BG
6) 2 hours post lunch test bg
7) drive home test BG
8) get home, run 3 miles...oh wait, don't forget to test your bg!
9) post-exercise maybe, maybe not, maybe eat dinner and, you guessed it, test BG
10) 2 hours post BG, test BG ****AGAIN****
12) stay up late? Maybe squeeze in another one, what if you have errands to run, what if you want to exercise more (when it's nicer out, I'll run 6-7 miles during the week, more on the weekends...a lot of times, I'll run a long run on Saturday and then a 20ish mile bike ride for fun, speed and recovery on Sunday...there's several extra strips in there...).
That's a pretty typical day of most weeks but a few extra tests fill in some "blank spots" and help you fix numbers that are close but need some work to adjust. If I'm partying or whatever in the evening, I might even do another test or two to be safe.
Make sure your Basal Insulin is not bad, or expired. Sounds like the fast-acting is working. Maybe the Basal is in need of switching...just a thought. Good advice from everyone else. Hope you get things a bit leveled out.
You wrote that you take 22 units of Lantus in the morning. Very likely this one shot will not cover 24 hours. If this is your problem you will have hours with perfect control after the injection of the Lantus. Then when the Lantus is loosing its potency you will see that your numbers are climbing. To prevent this the Lantus can be splitted. This means you inject 11 units in the morning and 11 units 12 hours later. Very likely you will have to increase the Lantus dosage to 15 / 15 or something like this. I assume this because your BG is going higher than 400. This means you are about 7 units short of basal insulin (my rough guestimation). Do the adjustments in small steps to prevent lows and do more testing. The first days will be rough and likely you will need many corrections. By gradually increasing the Lantus in 2 unit steps you will find the right dosage for you. On day one you start with 11 / 11 then on day two or three 13 / 13 and so forth.
That' very good advice and may offer a "simple" (ha ha, relatively simple anyway?) solution? I didn't really realize how much running BG all over the place, cleaning up the "morning mess" every day was until I got it straightened out with a pump and lots of BG tests. Since then, I've sort of stayed on top of it as I just feel better?
No idea about the gas, but the tongue problem could be that you're getting oral thrush from the bgs being so high. I like the suggestion of splitting and increasing the lantus as suggested on page 3, as well as Holger Schmeken's suggestions above. Also get a new bottle of lantus, if it's not working right, you're stuffed. As I didn't use much I used the penfills rather than a 10ml vial.
