Tuesday, January 3, 2017

Personal All Time Low

Murphy at 9 weeks
William hit a number I'd hoped never to see last night: 38 mg/dL. You might wonder, "How in the world...? Don't you have that fancy CGM thing?" We do. It did work. It alerted that William was 70 mg/dL. I tested and he was and with two units on board. Two units, if in range, can drop him as much as 60 points. I suspended his pump and gave him juice, set my alarm to 20 minutes for a recheck and settled in to watch an episode of "Lost" on Netflix in the middle of the night to keep me awake.

I watched the CGM continuously. It dropped a bit to 59, waiting for that juice to kick in. It never went below 59, but when twenty minutes were up, a retest shocked me. 38! William had been too high earlier in the evening and perhaps had gotten a bit aggressive with lowering his BG. Sometimes being high and fighting it with insulin is followed by a low.

While we were treating, Murphy woke up and excitedly was licking his face. William tried to hold her at arms length but she would not quit. An alert? I took it as one and gave her lots of high pitched praise and a spoonful of peanut butter. Out to potty, and then she went back to his bed to sleep. I am hoping this is the beginning. 

The thing is this: the CGM is very good at reading what IS. If I'm awake, I can look at a graph and predict the trend. I don't do so well at predication while asleep.  An alerting dog can actually detect up to 15 minutes before a CGM. Here's to Murphy and her future.



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