Did I think I was tired before? Now I am tired!

I have now realised why doing two children at the same time on a pump start is somewhat of a challenge. Its this needing to retest business. Whenever you have a higher reading than 14mmol you need to act by giving a correction, and then you have to re-test an hour later. Now that is fine if there is one person to have to set the clock for. What it doesn’t work so well on is when you have to correct one child at 1.30am and so wake at 2.30am to check them and, joy of joys, they are coming down from the high. But then you check the other as well and realise that they are now high, and so have to correct and get up again an hour later.

Then throw into that mix the fact that the one who was high before and had a big drink of water, though now getting lower, starts to need the toilet. So half way through your hour wait you have a wake up and have to get the other child settled back to sleep. And say that happens twice more through the night with each child. (Very tired sigh!)

This is my life at the moment people!

Actually, it is not so bad if you look at it from the right direction. I am learning so much so quickly. I can now see why you don’t use the bolus wizard to bolus for supper when you have had dinner less than an hour and a half before. The bolus wizard cannot believe that you have enough carbs in you to deal with the amount of insulin still on board and so it conservatively cuts down the amount for supper, which results in a very large spike in the night. If you know you have carb counted rightly, you can take over the bolusing job and be in control yourself. I will now not input a BG level when close to another meal when using the bolus wizard. I can use the bolus wizard for corrections - that will be useful - but not for actual food eaten. For that I shall rely upon my somewhat depleting brain powers. You see, that is a great bit of learning which will be very, very useful in days to come. Its a good thing that I found that out now, it really is. 2am is a great time for me to learn. It focuses like nothing else!

And I am now sure we have changed all of Joe’s basals to fit in with his having a drop during the early hours after he had eaten potatoes. I know Joe goes lower in the early hours after eating potatoes, I’ve known this for two years, but I didn’t put two and two together and work out that this would mean he would rise every other night on this basal pattern. So I have learnt two things. 1. Joe needs more basal insulin between midnight and 7am. 2. Joe (and probably Tom) needs a 25% reduction in basal rate between midnight and 7am whenever he eats boiled new potatoes.

Potatoes are wonderful things but I have always had a love/hate relationship with them for this very reason; they have no stable profile for my children no matter how they are cooked unless they are utterly saturated in fat. Animal fat makes them last twice as long as vegetable oil as well, just in case you are interested. So I can always tell when chippies have lied to my veggie family and actually cooked in lard ~ be warned all you chip shop owners. Perhaps now I will begin to love potatoes again, as I have the wonderful tool of those reduced basals

So, I will soon have potatoes and lentil soup covered. Only a few thousand other food stuffs to go. And I haven’t even started on pasta and rice yet… oh the joys! Still, you would have to fight my entire family very ferociously to get these pumps off us, you know. I had to give up sleep before with no hope that I would be able to get things right the next time. Now I have bucket loads of hope and plenty of patience to practice.

Now to find some tips on how to stop the dreaded air bubbles in the reservoir, and which ones to worry about. Joe had them in the reservoir again this morning, though not as many as yesterday when he looked like he had lemonade in there rather than insulin. At what point would anyone change the reservoir I wonder? None in the tubing though, so maybe we should just keep the pump upside down all day?