Congratulations on gaining access to the most powerful tool available, which insulin is. As you intimated, no one clamors to join the diabetes club, but once in . . . it makes sense to attack it with the best weapon in the arsenal. Insulin is an absolute, total game-changer—as you’re already experiencing.
Lots of good advice in the previous replies. Frios are terrific if you have one, but the main thing, however you achieve it, is to keep the insulin within its safe temperature range. Freezing or getting too hot will render it useless, which can get expensive. 
Knowing your I:C ratios and ISFs (Insulin sensitivity factors) will give you a lot more flexibility in dosing, but there’s time to learn that. “Diabetes is a marathon, not a sprint.” You’re in this for the long haul, so there’s no need to learn it all at once (even if you could, which you can’t; at some point the brain won’t take in any more and needs a cooling period). Learn a bit at a time. It will all come into focus more quickly than you may think.
Determining your I:C ratio is indeed something you can do. It’s simply a matter of controlled testing. Start when your BG is stable, eat a known amount of carbohydrate, wait until your BG reaches its peak, take a known amount of insulin and test every few minutes to see how much that amount of insulin drops your BG. Then it’s simple arithmetic to figure out how many carbs one unit of insulin will cover.
But, of course, it’s not quite that simple; nothing in diabetes ever is. For many (most?) people, I:C ratios are different at different times of day. So multiple tests are needed, not only to make sure you’re not relying on one single data point that could be an outlier, but also to determine what your circadian pattern is. But all of that can wait. You don’t need to do it right now. Get familiar with insulin in general terms first. There’s time.
One other thing you need to know about your own individual response to insulin: how long it takes to begin working. That’s a simple thing to test, too. The ideal we aim for is to mimic as closely as possible how a normal body responds to food. Pre-injecting allows you to time it so that the insulin begins working just as BG starts to climb. To do that you need to know how long a shot takes to begin working, which varies from individual to individual and from one type of insulin to another.
For example, Humulin R takes about 40 minutes to begin working for me, and Apidra takes about 15. So injecting that many minutes before sitting down to eat matches the insulin’s action with the food about as well as possible. That’s the ideal; not always achievable in practice. As someone else pointed out, in a restaurant it’s usually safer to bolus when the food arrives since the delay is essentially unpredictable and unknowable.
Sounds complicated, and in a sense it is. But trust us, it will become second nature, just like driving a car. Anyway, welcome to the Determined Survivors’ Club. 
The Dr started me on a 4, 4, 4 and 8 combination of Apidra and Lantus. So far my numbers have been excellent (I think). Morning numbers have been 4.2 and 4.6 (for the last few months I’ve been between 10-12). Post meal numbers have also been excellent, averaging about 6 at 2 hours (I’ve been between 10-16 for the last few months). The Diabetes educator told me to try and eat about 30g carbs per meal. For me this is new as I’ve been on 5-10g carbs for so long. Do you think 30 is a reasonable number per meal?
