A Kick in the Ba!!s

It's been a frustrating few days in the diabetes department. 

Highs. Lots and lots of highs. Stubborn sticky highs that come out of nowhere and refuse to come down. 

Stubborn sticky highs that happen the same time day after day. 

I had pretty much mastered my breakfast routine. Shower, hook up pump, bolus, wait 15-20 minutes while I get ready and make my lunch, eat and enjoy a pretty stable graph on my continuous glucose monitor until lunch. 

For the past 5 days, I've done that exact routine and yet every day for five days my blood sugar has spiked up to at least 16 and taken a few boluses to get it down. 

Dinner has been doing the same. Bolus, wait patiently for 15-20 minutes and then watch my blood sugar spike to the heavens and take a few hours to come down. 

I've changed my pump and put in new insulin twice. I've started waiting until my blood sugar is dropping rapidly from pre-meal insulin before I eat. I've started taking more insulin with my breakfast in an effort to avoid the spike. 

Nothing has worked so far. 

Here is my dinner spike last night. I have already taken my dinner insulin and I have bolused three more times (an extra five units in total) in an effort to stop the climb. No luck yet.

It's frustrating because it feels like I have lost all sense of what works and doesn't work. Lost all sense of what to do to to fix things. 

I don't want to say 'loss of control' because that would imply that I had control. Any sense of control when it comes to diabetes is an illusion. There is no control, there is only a lot of work, the ability to recognize patterns and a good deal of luck and intuition. 

The last five days has involved a lot of work, a lot of insulin, no predictable patters (other than a lot of highs) and very little luck. My intuition isn't working particularly effectively either. 

I've been here before. It lasts a few days. Maybe a week. And then, as quickly as it comes on, it disappears again. And my illusion of control returns. 

Sometimes I discover that I was getting sick. Other times I recognize that I was stressed. Most times, there is no obvious reason for the problem. 

I'm really hoping that my illusion of control returns soon. I'm feeling decidedly yucky from all the highs. My patience with the diabetes process is wearing thin and my willingness to 'go with the flow' is turning into something a little less lady-like and a lot more angry. 

It takes a lot of me to get to this point but I could give diabetes a good swift kick in the balls, I would. 

Twice. 

With steel-toed boots.