In the garden, and RAIN!!! (2)
POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Monday, September 7, 2026 11:50
VIEWED: 338648
PAGE 140 of 834
Back from mammogram and mah jong.
Both went okay. I managed 3rd place at mah jong this morning so that was pretty good. And my mammogram appointment went pretty fast too.
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Wow. I have WAY more control over this situation now with the continuous monitor implant system.
I hadn't eaten anything this morning because I wanted to get that set up first, and I'm running so low on test strips I wanted to do a prick test in tandem with the new unit and see how they matched up.
Sadly, it's not a super fast process setting it up, and I'm going to have to find a good time to do that in the future. Every time I change the sensor it takes the unit a few minutes to pair up with it and about 2 hours to "warm up"... whatever that means.
So I didn't test or eat until after 2:00PM when it said it was ready. Immediately it gave me an alarm because I was above 200mg/dL. Even with the Long-Lasting shot this morning I was still 230, down from 301 at 9:00AM.
I did a prick test and to my astonishment it was EXACTLY 230mg/dL at the same time. 
I did my math for the existing sugar reading and the carbs I was going to eat for lunch and came up with 12 units of Rapid-Acting. It was a slow crawl down and even spiked back up over 200 shortly after I ate, but I'm down to 155mg/dL at the moment, which is around 2.5 hours after I ate.
I think, perhaps, our math isn't right and I should probably be taking a bit more insulin... But I don't know if that's for the existing high level of sugar, the carbs I'm going to eat or both.
I was 110 over TARGET (2.75 units of insulin), and I figured 71 grams of carbs (8.875 units of insulin) [A small banana, 2 cups of Cheerios, and 1/2 cup of peanuts]. Unfortunately, after I'd already taken the shot I realized that skim milk has carbs, so I actually had about 5 more grams of carbs than I'd planned for, so it should have been 9.5 units.
Even still... I took 12 units, which was rounding UP. With the skim milk, it would have been 12.25, and since you need to use full units it was really incidental. My nutritionist told me to round down, but after last night I figured I'd start rounding up.
I'll have to play with it for now and see what works best for me. Maybe instead of dividing the blood sugar over target by 40 I should divide it by 35, or instead of dividing the carbs I'm going to eat by 8 I should divide it by 7.
I'm going to keep with the numbers the doc gave me for a few days and see if it levels out before I go making any changes. Who knows? I did just get taken off of oral meds that I was on for almost 3 weeks and that could be jacking things up with my body too.
In any event, this monitor system is awesome. It auto-updates my current sugar level every 5 minutes and keeps all of that info stored in memory. It also allows me to enter in my own information like how many units of insulin I'm using before meals vs. how many carbs I'm eating at the meal, and lets me enter in when I'm working out and all sorts of other stuff I haven't even looked into yet.
I think it should be enough to almost make this fun for me at least long enough to have memorized how much insulin I need for the foods I eat regularly where I don't have to really give it much thought anymore.
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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Well...
No. It would not be a good idea to fiddle with the insulin math... at least not now.
Just 10 minutes after I wrote that last message I dropped from 155 to 130. After that, I was talking to my aunt on the phone and noticed that it was just dropping bit by bit every 5 minute update. By the time it was at 96 she told me I should eat something and I said not yet. It hit 90 and I was still good. But then all of the sudden I felt the low feeling coming on and told her that I had to let her go and get something to eat. I was down to 85.
Without a great amount of new stuff on hand and my educational classes still almost 2 weeks away, I just measured out another 1/2 cup of unsalted peanuts (12 grams of carbs) and a few minutes later I was feeling normal again and back up to 93. We'll have to see how that looks later.
Geez... Is this my new life? Constant swings up and down? I thought there would be some regularity added to my life with the insulin. Hopefully now that I can monitor this and I know what I'm doing I can avoid any of the 300-500 numbers entirely and without them popping up maybe my system can better regulate these numbers without them going all over the map. I really don't want to feel that low blood sugar feeling even once per day, and I'm kind of surprised that I get it when I'm in the 80's and not when I'm below 70.
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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That seems to have done the trick........ But for how long?
I rose up to around 110 and hung there for a while after eating 1/2 cup of peanuts, but last reading just a few minutes ago was 95.
Like I said before, I hope once I get my numbers in a much smaller and safer range that things stabilize a bit, but I also wonder if perhaps my long-acting insulin shot is possibly at too high of a dose for when I'm using the rapid-acting shots correctly to balance out my carb intake?
I love this freakin' meter. It's so cool being able to read these stats on the fly and I can't wait to go over the data after I've got a few weeks of using it under my belt.
Makes me wonder how the hell I was even doing the last three weeks in the dark now that there is so much more data available to me. Even though I don't have a cell phone, it might be worth looking into buying a cheap used one just to get the app on it. It would allow for me to have much more data on the fly than the receiver shows and would probably be valuable for doctors visits in particular. I already have it on my computer and it's really cool what you can see there as opposed to the very limited functionality of the receiver.
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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That meter sounds really useful! Does it come with an alarm? Maybe so you don't have to watch it, but it'll beep for you when your reading goes too low (which is immediately dangerous) or too high (which does damage, but mostly in the long run).
Just OOC did your nutritionist give you an acceptable range? Like, from 80-200, or something like that? Bc one thing I know, everybody's blood sugar goes up and down... we're just not aware of it!
BTW that feeling is called hypoglycemia, which is what BRENDA tries to avoid. It's happened to me too, on occasion - friggin uncomfortable! What I was told (a long time ago) was that it's not necessarily how low your blood sugar is, but how fast it's falling. People can get down to 50-60 (not recommended!) without knowing if their blood sugar kind of creeps down instead of diving down.
Anyway, way cool, SIX! I'm impressed with the new technology! Maybe my sis' neighbor would take his blood sugar more seriously if he could see it spike up like it does.
:thumbsup:
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
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Quote:Nice that things went well, BRENDA! BTW, if you wait on tenterhooks thru the whole two weeks until you get mammo results, my experience is it's not necessary. Bad news travels much faster than good. The radiologist sends up a flare, the report goes to the top of the pile and gets hand-carried to the next responsible person, and you will get a phone call. So if you haven't heard anything in about five working days, I think it's safe to relax.
Originally posted by Brenda:
Back from mammogram and mah jong.
Both went okay. I managed 3rd place at mah jong this morning so that was pretty good. And my mammogram appointment went pretty fast too.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
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Port is out and except for the ungodly hour (got up at 5 AM to get to admissions by 7) things went well. In fact, the removal was so fast that the versed and fentanyl didn't start working until they were all done! Fortunately the local anesthetic worked fabulously. I started to feel a little woozy just as the surgeon was walking away, and had a nice snooze in recovery, which I thought was kind of funny bc recovery is where you're supposed to wake up.
I had an afternoon nap, tho, to make up for lost sleep.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
That meter sounds really useful! Does it come with an alarm? Maybe so you don't have to watch it, but it'll beep for you when your reading goes too low (which is immediately dangerous) or too high (which does damage, but mostly in the long run).
Yup! It's got two alarms. One for when you go too high and when you go too low. There's three, actually. I believe the factory set one that you can't change is 55mg/dL. I have my low at 80 and my high at 200. I'm going to change the low to 90 or 95 though because before I hit 80 I already know my blood sugar is low because my body tells me that it is.
Quote:
Just OOC did your nutritionist give you an acceptable range? Like, from 80-200, or something like that? Bc one thing I know, everybody's blood sugar goes up and down... we're just not aware of it!
She did not. The meter's software automatically does though for all of its charting and graphing. I believe their threshold is 70 on the low and for sure it's 180 on the high end of the acceptable range.
Before I ate tonight and about 20 minutes after I had spent 30% above 180 and 70% of the day within the acceptable range. (More on that later).
Quote:
BTW that feeling is called hypoglycemia, which is what BRENDA tries to avoid. It's happened to me too, on occasion - friggin uncomfortable! What I was told (a long time ago) was that it's not necessarily how low your blood sugar is, but how fast it's falling. People can get down to 50-60 (not recommended!) without knowing if their blood sugar kind of creeps down instead of diving down.
Right. Not a cool feeling. I'm extremely sensitive to it right now, which is probably a good thing. It appears that it does go down rather quickly when it's happening. It was probably only 15 minutes when I went from 110 to 85 and felt it.
Quote:
Anyway, way cool, SIX! I'm impressed with the new technology! Maybe my sis' neighbor would take his blood sugar more seriously if he could see it spike up like it does.
:thumbsup:
Yeah. Tell her about it. They have a few of these things on the market today. Mine would actually pair up with the automatic insulin pump should I chose to go that route one day.
Anyway... It seems that I pretty much nailed my insulin for my lunch, but dinner is a different beast. I think my brown rice has a lot more carbs in it than people think brown rice has or something. I'm spiking hard right now. 1 1/2 cups should have been in the area of 60 grams of carbs, but about an hour after I ate I'm hitting 200mg/dL again, and I wouldn't be surprised if I wake up at 300 or higher in the morning if I don't take another shot.
I'm not going to take another shot, but I've got to do more research on this and see what the hell is happening when I eat dinner and why I'm getting so high even though my units for what I'm eating are (or should be) right.
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Port is out and except for the ungodly hour (got up at 5 AM to get to admissions by 7) things went well. In fact, the removal was so fast that the versed and fentanyl didn't start working until they were all done! Fortunately the local anesthetic worked fabulously. I started to feel a little woozy just as the surgeon was walking away, and had a nice snooze in recovery, which I thought was kind of funny bc recovery is where you're supposed to wake up.
I had an afternoon nap, tho, to make up for lost sleep.
That thing looked ghastly. I bet you're happy to have it out!
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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So I looked into what I was eating to see what the heck is going on. The burger patties have spice, but theres nothing there.
It's the gorram rice that I'm using now and have been since they jacked up the prices so damn high. I switched to Nishiki, a brand on Amazon that is based in California.
I've probably been KILLING myself with this stuff.
Both my nutritionist and online said that 1 cup of brown rice is 40-45 grams of carbs, with the fiber content making it effectively 40.
NOT MINE!!!!
Serving size is 1/4 cup. THERE IS 32 GRAMS OF CARBS AFTER YOU SUBTRACT THE 2 GRAMS OF FIBER!!!!!!
So here I am, planning out 7 units of insulin to negate 60 grams of carbs, when I actually ingested 192 grams of carbs!!!! No wonder I'm reading so high every morning when I wake up.
I didn't want to over-correct by taking a bunch of insulin after I ate, so instead of taking the 12 extra freakin' units I'd need to negate all those extra carbs I took 6 and I'll fix it tomorrow when I eat breakfast.
Any idea what the hell Nishiki is doing with their rice, Sigs? How could their rice be so carb dense compared to other brown rice on the market?
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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