I can't do this. I can't figure anything out and I realize that any success I seem to have is just a coincidence, not real at all.
I eat so very little, but everything makes my BG go up. I can't calculate with any accuracy how much insulin will lower the BG and so my calculations about how much insulin I need to cover whatever I eat are also off.
I have been focused on Think Like a Pancreas, but I don't seem to fit any pattern very well. What is my Insulin Sensitivity Factor? I have no idea. I've only been taking an average of 10 units of Humalog a day, not that it actually works in any predictable way. That would mean that my ISF is 8.3-10 (150-180), but that's impossible. One unit does absolutely nothing at all most of the time. Four hours after taking it, my BG is likely to have risen 1.5 mmol/L or more without eating anything at all.
Delaying insulin and dividing the dosage, as I did last week, only worked those days and I don't really understand what was happening then. The first dosage obviously wasn't enough. The second overlaps and brings the BG down, but how do I know if it will bring it down enough? It might. I might not. What it does do is prolong the time before I can have another meal, since the second dose won't be out of my system for four or five hours. That's not a problem in itself, but if I want to have a meal with someone else, it means I can't eat at all before that meal or the schedule will probably be off.
My I:C ratio? Who knows? The endo said to start out with 1:10. I rarely eat 10 g of carb at a meal. If I'm only eating 4 g of carb, the carbohydrate ends up being distorted by the amount of protein I eat, so I'm covering for a higher effective amount. At least, ideally. But if my BG needs to be corrected, too.... it doesn't make sense. I'm really only playing with numbers for the I:C. The tables in Think Like a Pancreas are all for someone who takes a lot more insulin than I do and who sometimes eats as much carbohydrate at one meal as I eat in five or six days. And he's not calculating anything for protein.
I haven't even tried to figure out what to do about "exercise." For the last while, I haven't been getting any exercise to speak of because it raises my BG too much. I thought that insulin would help bring it down, but there's no guarantee it will do anything. Right now, the insulin makes it all seem even more unstable. It's hard to understand what Think Like a Pancreas says about exercise, anyway. Gary Scheiner is as terrified of ketones as he is of high levels of dietary fat. I eat a lot of fat. I am always in ketosis. If I ate as many carbs as he suggests, or ate three times the amount of carbohydrate I would eat in a single day just to take my dog for a walk, I'd be the size of a barn before Easter!
Meanwhile, my family is becoming increasingly difficult because I don't eat for most of the day and they think I'm testing my BG too much.
It looks like I need to forget about using insulin to get my BG down where it should be. It may not work consistently, or maybe I'm just too stupid to understand the patterns and what to do with them. Maybe, if I'm super careful and eat as little carb as possible, I can just drive the BG down that way. If it stays within a reasonable range for a few weeks, perhaps I could use insulin and I have no option but to eat more than a very few carbs. Some PWD never can really eat carbohydrate, right? It's part of being diabetic for them? Maybe I'm one of those.