Nonsense

Sometimes, my blood glucose levels make absolutely no sense. NONE.

Things have been going really well so far with my new multiple daily injections (MDI) course of treatment. After diligently checking my glucose levels 6+ times a day for a week, double what I was doing before, I thought I had a handle on things and decided to go back to three finger sticks a day.

Just after finishing my workout this evening and then showering, I tested. It had been two hours since I finished dinner. I had a 193 staring back at me.

What? I just finished my intense Jillian Michaels workout. I am renowned in my D classes for my incredible response to exercise. How did I muster the energy for this workout riding so high?

I decided to retest.

200.

Hmm. Maybe my meter is off? I use the control solution and that reading is just fine.

Tangent: is it annoying to anyone else that the control solution range has beautiful numbers? At least my FreeStyle does. The meter is working properly if the solutions tests 83-125. The diabetic is working properly if she tests 83-125. Is this supposed to make me feel inadequate?

Ok, so what happened here? My earlier numbers, fasting and before lunch, were perfectly fine. My dinner was perfectly reasonable, right around 55 grams of carbs. With my pre-dinner shot, I was expecting something around 130 or lower for my postprandial. My conclusion is that dinner didn't cause this.

So, what about my afternoon snack? I had some peanut butter with crackers right around 2:30 pm, which has about 21 grams of carbs. This is perfectly reasonable. I eat this snack every few days with no problems. I guess I have to back up to lunch.

You'd think that lunch couldn't cause so much trouble. Before I started MDI, I often had issues with the typical lunch that I took with me during the week. I have nearly the same thing every day: sandwich with meat and cheese and a smidge of mayo and mustard, carrot sticks, and some fruit. Never a very big serving of fruit. Today's was right along these lines, although I had cottage cheese instead of carrot sticks and a medium apple. By my calculations, this puts me around 60 grams of carbs, maybe just a bit over.

There are several issues afoot here. One, it's hard to trust my meter completely, as several bloggers in the diabetes-sphere have written about, most recently Kerri today. It could be off by up to 20% either direction. If I take that 200 as my starting point, I can be anywhere from 160-240. That's a huge range!

It's easy to blame my meter. Either way, I'm still way too high. And this leads me to question my carb counting. I thought I was pretty good at it, but this is an example where my calculations just weren't right. And it's frustrating. I had a few more highs this last weekend than I would have liked and I was determined to be in better control this week. Every time I ate today I was STARVING, yes with capital letters. How frustrating to not be able to eat when you're starving. But I didn't know that I shouldn't have eaten what I did because I cannot test at will. My insurance company helps dictate that decision for me. Of course there were no-carb things I could have eaten, but I was on campus for both snacks and lunch today. It can be a challenge to hunt down pepperoni slices or other forms of pure protein. I suppose I could have walked up to a lunch truck and ordered a chicken breast, but how realistic is that?

At this point I'm just whining. It's almost bedtime. Tomorrow is another day. Maybe I can do it better then.