You know what’s fun?

Christmas shopping. Finding that perfect gift for a family member, loved one, friend, boss, or frenemy that you’ve been waiting since last year to get back at during the White Elephant party. Yup, somebody is getting an angry-faced pig cookie jar this year, and it’s not going to be me.

You know what’s not fun?

My CGM alarming and saying my BG is 91 with two double arrows pointing down while I’m Christmas shopping. That does explain my lack of focus though, and why it was taking me an abnormal amount of time to evaluate the power tools when I originally went to the store to look for a flashlight. Go figure.

Holidays are treacherous times for us PWD’s, and I know I’m not the only one dealing with it. We have a sleigh load of food available at work, home, at parties, and it’s really hard to guesstimate exactly what is in all that “stuff” we’re shoveling in our mouths by the handful taste testing. I have a habit of overestimating, and then finding myself battling a Larry Low two or three hours after indulging.

Part of that is because I despise the feeling of a high BG. It feels like my blood has turned into molasses, I’m cranky because I don’t feel good, and I get impatient watching my numbers not drop back to normal at a rate that meets my expectations. A 200+ reading on my meter or CGM leads to me being irritated if it is anything more than a very temporary thing.

At my endo visit a couple weeks ago my A1C had bounced up a bit from 6.1 to 6.7, while I’ve been trying to prevent severe low BG’s that were plaguing me before. Now, I know that many people would jump for joy over a 6.7, and I realize that it isn’t a bad A1C necessarily. However, it makes me feel like a failure. For those of us waging war on a day-to-day basis with diabetes, we are harder on ourselves more than anybody else is. I hold myself to a high standard when it comes to my diabetes. Whether or not it’s the reality of diabetes, I need to feel like I have some control of it, besides just telling it where it can go with a colorful description of the hand basket it can go there in. I feel I can do better than a 6.7, and get it back closer to 6.0. This is just my goal, and YDMV.

For the longest I was pumping with a single steady basal rate, 24 hours a day. I know that isn’t how the body works, but I was bolusing and temp basaling all around it, basically manually adjusting my rate of insulin as necessary. Then I got my CGM and a Certified Diabetes Educator (CDE) and Medtronic rep who is really knowledgeable about how BG’s ebb and flow, the dawn phenomenon, effects of activity, and many of the intricacies of living with diabetes. Presently, I am working hard with my CDE to get my basal rates optimized, examining trends, analyzing BG’s, and getting a better grip on preventing my BG’s from dropping too low and spiking too high. Perhaps I could have chosen a better time than December to attempt this, but meh…pressure makes diamonds, and I’m determined to ace this.

Since I met with my CDE and adjusted my basal rates, and then made a few more adjustments on my own after finding times of the day that my BG’s would spike inexplicably, things seem to be getting better. My average BG in the last week is down to 157 mg/dl, from a pre-adjustment average that was closer to 200.

I’ll take that kind of progress any day, and even more so with the holidays.