Diabetes is a high maintenance disease. Please note that I am not comparing it to any other diseases or implying that it is better or worse to have diabetes. I am just making the observation that diabetes is an extremely high maintenance disease.
When you have diabetes, it takes over your life. There are so many variables to keep track of, and many of them seem to be arbitrary at times. Then you have to make calculations based on past data and future considerations.
To give you an idea of what I go through, I will outline a pretty typical day for me. I decided to use a day from when I was still working because that is more interesting than just sitting around the house all day.
I wake up at 6:30am for work. I check my sugar and it is 214. I go to the fridge to take my insulin. I get the syringes out and measure 50 units of Humulin-N. This is my long acting insulin and it provides a base for the next 12 hours.
I am allergic to the really fast acting synthetic insulins, so I have to go with Humulin-R for my short acting insulin. I need to take it a half an hour before I eat. I have a sliding scale for this, so I have to figure out how much to take when my sugar is 214. According to my scale, I should take 75 units.
At this point, I look at what I am going to have for breakfast, when I will be having lunch, and what I am going to be doing between now and then. Breakfast will be eggs and toast, so it should not affect my dose. I should be able to have lunch at around 11:00am, so that should not affect my dose. My plan is to stay in my office and work on paperwork all morning. I decide to bump my dose up to 85 units because I will not be moving very much.
I take a shower, get dressed, and make breakfast. I eat at around 7:15am, take my morning dose of Metformin, then head to work. When I get there, I put my lunch in the fridge and start on the paperwork that was waiting for me.
At 9:15am, I get a call that one of the departments cannot access the network, so I get up and walk over to their building to see what is going on. It takes me about an hour and a half and a lot of walking back and forth to troubleshoot the problem and fix it.
I get back to my office at about 11:00am, just in time to eat lunch, but I have not taken my sugar or insulin yet. I check my sugar, it is 294. I waited too long and I did not have a snack. This seems counterintuitive, but that will raise my sugar.
I know that since I have been doing some walking, I won’t need as much Humulin-R this afternoon. I take 75 units instead of the 90 units that my scale says. Then I eat my lunch: pasta with meatballs and a salad.
I have a couple more trouble calls in the afternoon, so I did walk a little bit. I am very happy that I went easy on the insulin. I also had a snack at about 3:00pm, a Twix bar.
I leave work at 5:00pm and head home. When I get home, I check my sugar and it is 141. We are having cheeseburgers and mac & cheese for dinner and ice cream for desert. I take 35 units of Humulin-R and 50 units of Humulin-N. I take my evening dose of Metformin with dinner.
I check my sugar at about 9:00pm and it is 121. I have a piece of toast with peanut butter on it. I check my sugar again at 11:00pm and it is 119.
That is a typical day. Some days I check my sugar more often, especially if I do not feel well. But on typical days there are 5 finger pokes to check my sugar, 5 shots of insulin, and a number of calculations.
DJ's Diabetes Blog 