Sometimes I jinx myself.

It seems that every time I write a post or just look in the mirror and think “Wow!  Things sure have been going well…” my blood sugar decides to go off on wild bumper car excursions.  Sometimes I can blame myself for the results–oh yes, I shouldn’t have had that double bowl of chocolate ice cream last night–but just as often it’s just one of those things.  It’s a reminder that hard work and good decisions usually lead to good results but that every so often diabetes throws a temper tantrum trying to remind me who’s in charge.

I get oodles of motivation when I do things right and I get good results.  However, when I think that I have done things correctly and I get bad results, I am very quick to say “What the hell!” and go off the deep end with bad decisions.

When the numbers are good, it’s easy to think that I am in control of everything that affects my blood sugar.  I can take my insulin adhering to all of the preset and tested ratios in my pump.  I can show incredible willpower and have an egg and spinach omelet for breakfast when I am starved for a bowl of cereal with bananas and milk.  Oh, how I do miss cereal for breakfast.

When the numbers are bad, I usually blame myself.  If I take responsibility for the good numbers, it seems logical that I should take credit for the bad numbers.  But there are times that I eat a low carb breakfast with an appropriate insulin bolus and my blood sugar soars into the 200’s.  If I understand correctly what books tell me, some of these morning blood sugar excursions are the result of hormones screaming at my liver to pump out glucose at the same time they try to interfere with the action of my insulin.  But where were those hormones yesterday and the day before when my body thought the same breakfast was hunky-dory and my numbers were great all morning.

Recently I participated in a study that was investigating whether blood sugar rises at the end of the two or three day life of a pump infusion site.  Today was the third day of what has been a fine infusion site, but when I was high through much of the day, I changed out the set.  My problem is that I usually go high when I have a new infusion set.  So I was high because of the old set and then high because of the new set.

So today I am ranting.  Highs are much more enjoyable when you have the guilty memory of a hot fudge sundae.  But I have been doing a really good job of eating low carb lately and totally ignoring the call of chocolate covered donuts.  So this isn’t fair.  You mean diabetes doesn’t play fair!  Wow, that’s not very nice.