Last night my blood sugar at bedtime was 64, so I ate a bowl of cereal and milk. It’s a decent bedtime snack for me, and it typically results in a morning blood sugar in the low 100s, which is where I want to be.
But I woke up at 6:30am with a head that felt full of cotton balls, and my blood sugar was 315. Wow! I took a correction bolus, drank coffee, and got ready for work.
Several hours later, the stuffed-head feeling still had a hold on me. I thought of taking another few units of insulin, convinced that I was loaded with glucose resistant to coming down. But I wanted to eat something, too, so I checked my blood sugar. Ha! The magic 100. (Wasn’t there last year some sort of effort by the diabetes crowd to collect and post pics of “the perfect score”? Finally, I have one.)
I bolused enough for some food, which I ate. The headache took a while longer to subside, even thought my numbers had settled down and stayed that way all afternoon.
Those 100s seem to come totally by accident, when they do, and the achievement of today is not really that number. I’m glad I didn’t rely on my intuition today to tell me what my blood sugar was. Sometimes I believe my brain and senses comprise an on-board glucose meter, which is a ruse.
Glucose meters lack accuracy, but their plus or minus 20 percent monitoring beats the error in my estimate based on body awareness or a “felt sense” today. I was convinced I was hovering around 300 and found out I was 100. Imagine if I had taken a correction bolus without testing, without eating? That would have ended up in a blood sugar nosedive.
I always hear bells and sirens when I see a magical 100 mg/dl – like when you hit the jackpot on a slot machine or something! Haha!
Isn’t it confusing when we can’t trust our feelings? I can only imagine the surprise when you saw that reading.