Glukey

The battery cover on Glukey wouldn't unscrew, and I was chipping it with trying with the coins. The rep said not to use a screwdriver. I called the helpline, they said to use a screwdriver because they could replace the battery cap if needed, for free, but would rather not have to replace the whole thing, which is what they'd need to do if if the battery wouldn't come out. The screwdriver was like magic.
I inserted a sensor around 10:00 this morning. It is working fine. During the warm up I got crazy ISIGs like 160 and 0.00, but now it's at 17.72, and my blood sugar is about 170 (I just checked). I put it low on my right arm and it hurts a lot. Last time, it hurt pretty intensely for the first two days but not much after that. Right now if I move my arm wrong it sends a shooting pain through me. Yowch. I put IV-3000 down with a hole in it for the sensor beneath the whole sensor-transmitter contraption, and then band-aided the transmitter down.

Locker Renewal

I went to renew my locker and I was signing the contract and noticed that it says that the locker is subject to searches for drugs and other contraband. I was like, I keep medical supplies there, how often do they search. She was like, I don't think they actually search them regularly, do you have diabetes? I was like, how'd you guess- oh wait, was it my powered by insulin hat? She said no, my mother has diabetes.
I said what type. She said Type 1. I said How's that going for her?
She said it's going well, actually, her mother was diagnosed seven years ago in her thirties.
My locker is safely renewed. Good place to stash food needles and insulin.

Off Guard

It has been a bit over a week since I took out the sensor. My blood sugar has been not better or worse, really. The only real difference is that I feel rather uninclined to check my blood sugar.
One thing I learned from the Guardian is that I get much more acurate BG results if I wash my hands or feet, and so now if I don't want to wash my hands or feet, I don't want to check my blood sugar. And furthermore, my fingers and toes ache. They always ache. Checking my blood sugar a mere four times per day while on the Guardian was not a big enough decrease to allow my fingers to heal, or perhaps they are just very slow healers. In any case, I don't want to check my blood sugar.
Another thing the Guardian taught me is that my overnight blood sugars are not even vaguely linear. Not even three or four linear pieces. They go up and down and up and down and up and down and if I check my blood sugar an hour before and at bedtime, so what? That information no longer seems useful. My blood sugar takes a bumpy path all night long.
I am not super excited about wearing another sensor. Although my blood sugar was much better than average during the first week of sensor wear, it was not good the last week and I spent all night high despite the thing. I feel like my initial enthusiasm had more to do with it just being a good week.
One of the most frustrating thing about diabetes is that I have good weeks and bad weeks and I don't know why and the Guardian has demonstrated aptly that two nights in a row don't even tend to be as consistant as I'd thought. My nights are the most difficult. People talk about the pump allowing another basal, but that would do me no good because it is hard to predict which nights I'll go up; sometimes a night is just perfectly flat. All night long. And I didn't do anything different, it just happened that way!
The daytime isn't bad; the Guardian confirmed that I mostly don't have postprandial spikes and when I do, they're only by about 30 mg/dl. So not much of a big deal.
My meter average for this week is 113, and for the last 30 days is 117. My guess is that my A1c, when it gets tested in two weeks, will have dropped by at least half a point, back to the lower 6s. Maybe a little bit more. I am looking forward to finding out. I intend to also get screened for celiac again at that appointment.

I had some more teeth filled. I was half asleep through it again. The novocain really seems to make me drowsy, which is a known side effect that doens't happen to most people.

Finished Sensor 1

It lasted just under 3 weeks. I probably could have gotten it to last longer, but it was performing inaccurately that day and I was like screw this and yanked out the sensor. The target range set that the chart below gives is 70 as the bottom limit all the time, and 140 as the top from midnight until 6:30, 180 the upper limit from 6:30 until noon, and then 150 as the upper limit the rest of the day. I ran a lot more hypo the first week and had major problems with running high overnight the rest of the time.

Jonah's SG Statistics

time	SG average	Above range	In range	Below range	Standard Deviation
Sensor 1	112	10%	83%	7%	32.3
May 4	104	0%	89%	11%	23.8
May 5	110	2%	87%	11%	31.8
May 6	120	0%	100%	0%	19.9
May 7	102	2%	86%	12%	29.7
May 8	105	5%	88%	7%	25.5
May 9	125	23%	75%	2%	36.9
May 10	88	0%	47%	53%	34.9
May 11	86	2%	76%	22%	20.9
May 12	100	0%	99%	1%	21.6
May 13	110	11%	78%	11%	36.9
May 14	109	0%	100%	0%	20.9
May 15	113	13%	87%	0%	24.5
May 16	120	29%	71%	0%	34.6
May 17	146	37%	63%	0%	35.7
May 18	118	19%	78%	2%	35.4
May 19	106	5%	94%	1%	22.1
May 20	125	16%	78%	6%	38.4
May 21	120	12%	88%	0%	24.2
May 22	109	6%	82%	12%	27.8
May 23	109	8%	78%	13%	35.0

Guardian

Man, I am having fun with my little glukey. Who else thinks that I'm euglycemic almost all the time? I love that! According to glukey, the highest any of my meals has peaked at so far is 176, and the rest of the meals peaked below 150. YES!
I've had the sensor in my arm for just short of seventy-two hours now, and have been getting readings for the past 60. The rep said that I could try extending sensor life past each 3 day increment if the ISIG was above 5; so far it hasn't been below 8.7, and that's only when I'm hypo. The accuracy so far has been pretty good. Not perfect, but pretty darn good.

Here is a list of things I wish I could do with Glukey. Some of them might be features I just haven't located yet.
1. I want to reset the graphic so that the top of the screen is 200 rather than 315, so that I can see the slope more dramatically. I have yet to see a reading on here of 200, let alone 300, and I think that having the graph show my actual range is not a ridiculous request.
2. Show me what I've imputted for my meals and insulin. That would be so useful!
3. Let me upload the info onto my computer with a USB port. I don't seem to have whatever sort of outlet it is that goes with the cable that came with the comlink software, and neither does my dad's computer. That's a real bummer. If any of you have advise on how to find a computer to look at my data on, that would be helpful.
4.I want to be able to scroll back and look at the window that showed up 3 hours ago under the 3 hour graph. I want the 5minute by 5minute view of what happened after I fell asleep, not the 10minute by 10minute version.
5. Louder alarms. My first night with the sensors, I woke up at 3AM to a LO SG alarm. My accu-chek aviva confirmed that my blood sugar was 52. Scrolling back however, I saw that at 1 AM, my blood sugar'd been 40. Glukey apparently alarmed then too, but I didn't wake up.

Last night I ate supper and injected for it, around 1800 hours. At 2015 hours, I checked my blood sugar: it was 175. I took two units of Novolog and decided to take an extra five units of Lantus. I'm pretty sure I did. At 2223 hours, I was ready to go to sleep. I checked my blood sugar, expecting something between 100 and 200. My meter read 362. WTF?! I rechecked and it said 299, which was still way too high. I injected 5 units Novolog and set my alarm clock for 200 hours. I woke up about five minutes before the alarm would've gone off, checked my blood sugar at 160, injected 1.5 units Novolog- all by the light of my answering machine- and went back to sleep. In the morning I woke up with a blood sugar of 102. I think it's a little funy that a crappy night like that one is recorded as a success 'cause I woke up 102, but on the other hand I think I deserved it. I worked for that 102. Wish I knew what happened to make my blood sugar go so high.

My first sensor will be inserted tommorow night... wow.

Grumblings, and a Drawing on Needle Length

Minimed says that I only get four sensors with the guardian. That means that the guardian actually costs 760 dollars more than the navigator does.
I am wearing a small patch of IV3000 on my left arm, to see if I have an allergic reaction to it. I'm not looking at the arm, but since I don't feel anything, either it fell off or so far so good.

I was doing a shot on Saturday in front of another diabetic and she commented on how short my needles are (5mm). She says that that length is too painful for her, and said that it was maybe because I'm skinnier. I think though, that it has more to do with how thin my skin is (THIN!). If she were injecting, say, her forearm, she'd probably prefer the short needles. This is a graphic I did on the wisdom of picking the right length of needles. To be honest, most people have more fat than this in most spots that they'd inject.
Intradermal injections, which I have accidentally done when I've had too much angle going in, can cause a bump if the volume of the injected liquid is great enough and close enough to the surface. It leaks into the fat slowly, and it hurts for as long as the fluid remains there to irritate the pain receptors in the skin. OUCH!
Intramuscular injections can be as painless as subcutaneous ones, but they're often not. It's pretty easy to irritate a muscle.

Guardian Arrived

A little past noon, as I was getting ready to go to work and saying goodbye to my mother, the doorbell rang. I ran to buzz, then zoomed down the stairs, not quite colliding with a fedex dude. I started to ask him if it was my minimed guardian, then saw the minimed symbol and flourish on the box, and answered my own question. The fedex dude said he'd come with me for my mother to sign it, but I said I'd sign for it myself- my name on the box, wasn't it? I guess I'm still not looking my age. Nineteen and a half years old as of yesterday.

So I opened the box to look at the contents. There was a lot in there. Unfortunately, there were only four sensors. I was told that I'd be getting ten. I thought I must have figured wrong, but my mother said I should call Minimed, so I did. The customer service lady said that she knew that ten should've shipped with the Navigator, but that she wasn't sure about the guardian. She had me leave a voicemail for the same dude who I'd called more than a dozen times without reaching when I was figuring costs. I hope I get another six sensors. I already spent a goodly chunk of money and I was figuring on getting ten sensors. Not four!

Three other surprises in the box: I got ten things of IV3000, which I didn't know I was getting, and which suggests I was supposed to get ten sensors, 'cause a plain IV3000's not useful. I also got an operating manual that says it goes with the Navigator, which isn't what I got. I also got two batteries, which wasn't a very big surprise, though a nice one.

I was late for work.

three Things I've Learned

I'm still fairly new; less than two years into diagnosis. But I'm a lot farther and I've moved beyond the basics. Here are some things I didn't even used to know were there to ask about.

1. Carbohydrates are not the only things that you can eat that will raise your blood sugar. It is common for protein to be converted to sugars and to them raise your blood sugar sometime after carbohydrates will. Having lentils and beans for supper might raise your blood sugar a few hours later (because of the protein).
In addition, some substances, such as caffeine, may give you insulin resistance.
And a minority of diabetics, including myself, experience dramatic rises in blood sugar after consuming some artificial sweeteners.

2. Your diabtes really and truly does vary. Even though somebody else has your same type of diabetes, xe definitely does not have your same body.

3. Your meters are not very accurate, even when they're consistant. That's a fact of diabetes life. You can improve the accuracy of your meter, but it will still be inaccurate.

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My Guardian shipped today. It's still in California.