I had an interesting day yesterday. I had a 10am meeting. It was a 90 minute drive to get to the meeting. I changed my infusion set at 7am. It went in kind of weak. I assessed it and thought it was ok. My blood sugar was 114 when I changed the infusion set. Took a shower and began my drive to the meeting at 8:15am. On the way I stopped at a rest area and checked my blood sugar. It was 185. I found this to be a curious number because I had not eaten anything. I did have a cup of coffee but I had covered it. I attributed it to the stress of the drive and gave myself a correction bolus of 2 units. After my meeting I checked again – it was 185. Now, I was becoming suspicious of my site. I checked and and smelled for insulin. It looked OK. Took another 2 units. Had lunch and on my drive back home I felt I needed to check again. 475! NO! This is not a reading I get. I was driving so I gave myself some more insulin and planned on stopping to get gas in 45 minutes so I would check again. When I stopped it was 500. That’s it. I decided I needed to change my site. I also decided to take an injection of insulin to insure I was getting some in there. I took 6 units by injection. Put another port in and took another 5 units. I got back home in about an hour and I had come down to 185. Drank a lot of water to cleanse my body from the highs. Now, I had another concern. I had 6 units On Board from the pump and the injection I had taken was another 3 units at least. I began checking every 15 minutes. Next reading was 122. Then 96. I decided to take off the pump and drink 6 oz of juice. 61. Ok I was feeling low. I was crashing. More juice and a pretzel. 63. 65. Now I had balanced it out but I needed to get higher. I was getting hungry so I ate some. I knew I was going to go high but I wanted to get out of the tailspin. I was feeling better. 185. Ok. I was back. Now I bolused 2 units to get level again.
What are the lessons:
1. If you feel an infusion set does not go in correctly then maybe it is best to put a new one in right away. Putting in infusion sets is a ritual for me most of the time. I take great care in putting them in and caring for the site when I take them out. Perhaps I was in too much of a hurry in the morning to take the care I usually do.
2. If you are going on a trip make sure you have insulin, syringes and extra infusion sets. You never know what will happen. Because I have made this a practice I was able to do something about it.
3. Going high is a problem. We need to be “on it” when it happens. When I took out the old infusion set I bled a lot. It got all over the place. That was confirmation that it was a site issue. But going low is the real problem in this lesson. I obviously over corrected. I knew enough to check every 15 minutes while I was “crashing.”
4. Drink Water!