It has been two months since Medium’s diagnosis of T1D and my husband and I thought we could go out for a quick dinner by ourselves. Medium’s brother, Large is a very responsible seventh grader and Medium is all over this diabetes stuff. So we felt okay to leave them all for a quick bite to eat down the street.
Medium’s BG at 6:30 was 113. He ate a 54 carb dinner and was bolused two units of insulin. (He is on a 1:30 carb ratio. Meaning for every 30 carbs he eats, he gets one unit of insulin. So in this example he was just a teeny bit overdosed, he should have eaten 60 carbs to make it a perfect 1:30 ratio.)
We left the house at 7:00 after Medium had finished eating and gave them explicit instructions to check his BG again at 7:30 since the drug peaks at 81 minutes and he was just barely overdosed and it was a new insulin pen (new insulin tends to have a bit of a “kick”). Plus Medium and Small were on their way down to the basement to play a rousing game of indoor basketball when we left so we knew with all of those factors, he could go a little low. And we told them that if he is low at 7:30 when he checks that he should then have a snack. Medium is well-versed in snacks. He is very insulin sensitive and very active and tends to run on the lower side more often than on the higher side. So he gets “free” (meaning he doesn’t have to dose for them) snacks all the time. In fact, we rarely ever dose for snacks. He doses for his three meals a day, and that is usually it. If we do dose him for a snack, it tends to send his BG’s all out of whack so we try to just give small snacks without dosing when he is lower throughout the day.
So here we are, thinking we are so smart and thinking we have thought it all through and have all angles covered, and we have a plan and everyone knows the plan and so we are leaving for date night.
So much for having a plan.
We hadn’t been gone 5 minutes when Large calls and says, “Medium is thirty-one”.
ME: “I’m sorry, what did you say? One thirty-one?”
LARGE: “No, thirty-one.”
ME: “Shit!”
Medium gets on the phone and asks what he should have. I tell him he should have 4 glucose tabs and then some peanut butter crackers and we turned the car around and headed back home. By the time we got there he was on the couch, pale and sweating. I got him a cold wash cloth and Brian and I sat with him and watched him eat. We retested him and he was up to 76 ten minutes later. Thirty minutes after that he was 132 and an hour and a half after that he was 210. Brian just checked him again, five hours after he was 31 and with nothing else to eat other than the 4 glucose tabs, peanut butter crackers and several pieces of cheese and he is now at 319. From 31 to 319.
Tonight’s score: Diabetes-1, Rawlings family-0
I hate diabetes.
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