HB
and I recently started watching the show Once
Upon A Time and,
for those of you who don't watch it, oh my goodness is it addictive.
The plot is a witty, complex hybrid of fairy tales and
(Hollywood) reality that has story book characters fighting for their
memories and lives in the fictional small town of Storybrooke, Maine.
The reason I bring this up is that there is a scene in Season
One where Snow White is talking with Grumpy and the other dwarves
about her intention to take a potion that will cause her to forget
all of her pain. Grumpy, who Snow is specifically trying to
convince of the brilliance of her plan, talks her out of her
voluntary amnesia by explaining to her that "as wretched as it
is, I need my pain. It makes me who I am. It makes me
grumpy."
Now,
if you can't find the humor in that brilliant script writing then I
have no further explanation of anything in this post worth reading.
But, in the feeble attempt to throw a grain of salted humor on
an otherwise open wound, I have to admit that Grumpy totally has a
point: we are a walking, talking portrait of our histories and, to
be true to ourselves, we must acknowledge who we are and where we've
come from. So starting as a pregnant diabetic and going from
there, I have somehow managed to turn into a crotchety, bearded dwarf
in the past couple days.
Someone
really ought to call the tabloids.
It's
a combination of the stress of the last three weeks, the overcast,
crumby, dank weather outside and the constant hypoglycemic blood
sugars I keep fighting that have caused the change. If it wasn't for
GW's incessant hugs and kisses I'd probably shrink a couple inches
and be permanently attached to a pickaxe by now, but seriously, you try to
be low all the time and not turn grumpy! It makes me shake, it makes
me sweat, it makes me short tempered, it makes me physically and
mentally weak, and it makes me worried. The last of which is by far the worst symptom.
As
I've explained previously, at this point in a diabetic pregnancy -
regardless of what type of diabetes you're talking about - the mother
should be experiencing increasing insulin resistance as a result of
the placenta creating copious amounts of pregnancy hormones that
cause the body to ineffectively absorb insulin. In other words,
there should be increased insulin requirements, more regular
hyperglycemic readings and very few hypoglycemic episodes. But
over the last couple days, I have been struggling to keep my blood
sugars out of the 50s and I've been decreasing my basal and
bolus rates to fight off the low, grumpy, blah blues...
I
mean, I wake up and my blood sugar is in the mid 60s so I eat
breakfast to correct this and it some how manages to drop lower when
it ought to even out. I correct for it again (home
made fudge for GW's bday, so good and sooo very full of carbs)
and remain low. I repeat this a couple more times and remain
low. And finally I under bolus at dinner and manage to get up
into the 90s-130s for a while - but even at that point, while that is a
safe, healthy number it is lower than it typically ought to be for a
postprandial with "insufficient insulin."
HB
faxed my logs to the endocrinologist and, when she eventually calls
back, I expect her to basically confirm that I should decrease my
basal and bolus rates (which I've already
done)
- but that doesn't explain why
my
rates are decreasing. We also contacted the
perinatologist to get their take on it and make sure that we're not looking at the issue we
were warned about at my infamously "healthy" week 29
appointment of placenta deterioration (aka the old placenta). Unfortunately, all of my diabetes and pregnancy books and web sources indicate that this is likely the case but until the perinatologist confirms this I'm just not ready to go there.
Ideally the
situation would be entirely my fault due to poor carb counting or
manual errors in programming my pump, but I know my pump is dead nuts where
the endocrinologist told me have it at my last appointment and Lord help anyone
who thinks I can't do the basic arithmetic it takes to do accurate carbohydrate counting. I'm
hard enough on myself about being diabetic and doing things right the first time that slacking or miscalculation
just doesn't happen at this consistent rate... not exactly uplifting.
Hopefully the docs will get back to me
shortly, but for the time being I'm going to hide in my bedcover-cave and grumble whenever I have to emerge for yet another quick
carb. Definitely not the lying in bed eating bon-bons situation I'd like to be in.
Hmph.
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