2 weeks later…

My dad celebrates his 64th birthday today - happy birthday, dad! - and ironically, I feel like I am about 64 today. Being on night duty, day duty and school duty is tiring me out. It needs to be done, however, and it is revolutionising how the boys feel and their blood sugars, so I am not complaining in an ‘I don’t want to do this anymore’ way. Just in a ‘Blimey, this feels like two full-time jobs’ sort of way.

And now to the nitty gritty of all this. What have the boys’ levels been like. I think the only word I could use would be ‘brilliant’. Even though we are still playing with the basal at the moment, I mean we are only two weeks in, Joe has only been up to 15mmol  3 times in the last 7 days. Tom is rarely going above 13mmol, except when he shot up to 22mmol after having the sensor put in (oh, the obvious benefits of adrenaline), and even then is able to correct his levels so quickly and easily it is never for more than an hour at the most. Tom’s eating has so much more freedom, as do we all as a family. We tested it all so much at the weekend, challenging the pumps to cope with chips on the beach from the local chippy, sweeties from the local shop in the afternoon and then a delicious but full of fat Indian takeaway in the evening. And we did cope. Their levels were what we expected they would be. On their average BGs on their monitors Tom’s is 8.3mmol and Joe’s 9.2mmol. Not bad at all.

I am astonished by the sensors. I suspect they may be more of a feature for the children than I thought. It is utterly unbelievable to be able to check their progress without doing so many blood tests. We have had to do about 9 tests a day per child for the last year or so, to get anywhere near safe control. Yesterday, I twice looked at Tom’s sensor to see what he was on when I would otherwise have needed him to do a bm. The sensors come into their own when you have a crisis looming and don’t know what to do. And thereby hangs a tale…

Last night I made a big basmatti rice blunder. I didn’t do a bad carb count or anything like that. No, I failed to cook it properly. To be fair, Olly is usually the basmatti rice cooker in our house. I am the chilli with US long grain cooker. But I pushed the boat out last night and decided to do beany omlette with chilli tomato sauce and basmatti rice. This is a really nice combo, if your wondering. It was the meal I ate before I went into hospital to give birth to Joe - I think the hot chilli sauce had something to do with my going into labour, actually. But back to the basmatti… I basically over-cooked it and made it all sticky and clumpy instead of fluffy and individual. This had a dramatic effect on the boys levels. Maybe it was all down to the rice, but it may be not, I’m not sure until I repeat another basmatti meal and see if the same things happen when its cooked as it usually is when Olly does it.

Either way, both boys stayed down in the low 4’s and upper 3’s throughout the evening. They had a supper and bolused for it using the wizard and the lower level, but this wasn’t enough to hold them. In the end I had to give both of them hypo treatment. I also reduced their basal for an hour by 75%. This did do the trick, but it also meant Tom had to be corrected at 3am as he was on 12.3mmol. Joe stayed lower most of the night but had gone up to 12mmol by morning. Boo hiss!

One thing I am finding now though is that the boys are both having their insulin pulled back even further.   Hitting the right levels for most of the time is showing that they need less insulin to work its magic. Tom has gone down to about 13units per day, with 39% as basal and Joe to about 27units per day, and on about 40% basal. Joe was having a 1:15 ratio for dinner, higher than lunch and most other times  1:18, except breakfast at 1:12. I am just about to put it back to 1:18 now as he is dropping lower before bed. Tonight both boys wanted a snack before they went to sleep, whilst I read them Harry Potter. I let them both get an apple. Tom bolused for it at 10g cho, but Joe forgot to bolus for his… naughty! However, he is only on 9mmol now at 11pm. So that 10g cho hasn’t done that much damage. I am hoping the ratio change will mean this wont be happening again - I would prefer to have it right so that the apple missed makes him high.

Joe’s sensor is due to run out tomorrow again. I don’t know if I should even try for another New Sensor attempt. Maybe that would be too much for him without moving its site. He’s had to have three sets in a row on one buttock as it is. I’ll have to find a better place to put the sensor so we can move the sites around a bit. Although I suppose if he has another sensor in it will go on the other side and this one will get more sets, so they’ll balance out eventually.

 I still haven’t managed to get the pumps downloaded. I have got the lead plugged in and even managed to get to some settings. But the actual down load has eluded me. This may be in direct correspondence with the fact Olly has been out for the past three nights with his students performing their experimental stand-up comedy shows. Funnily enough, as an experiment he asked Joe and Tom to write his scripts. I might post some of the excerpts on here as an attempt at comedic relief. Either that or the graphs, whichever I get to first.

Too tired to think, so off to drink a cup of decaff tea and see if Newsnight isn’t just too lively to wake me up until Olly gets back. Yawn.