Give Insulin a Chance

My husband, Clayton, is a firefighter so he works at the station for 24 hours. His schedule goes like this: on a day, off a day, on a day, off a day, on a day, off for 4 days...repeat...

Don't worry - I have a color-coded calendar to help me keep track of this. He works on red days.

I also work. I work in the office Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and from home, half-days, on Monday and Friday.

So if it's a blue or green Thursday, my husband becomes *Domestic Divo* and takes care of the kids and house stuff while I'm at work.

But...let's say it's a red Wednesday...who watches the girls?

Mimi !!! (aka my Mom)

Mimi with Ella

Mimi's gotten pretty good with all of this diabetes stuff, but it's pretty complex and unless you live with it 24/7, the small idiosyncrasies can be confusing.

Ella's insulin duration is set at 2 hours which means it takes about 20 minutes for it to start working, it peaks at about 1 hour and then after 2 hours it's pretty much out of her system. 2 hours is pretty aggressive...a lot of people set it at 3 or even 4 hours...but 2 hours works for us.

So let's say she eats breakfast at 8:00am. I really can't tell what her her true blood sugar is until the insulin has completed its job 2 hours later at 10:00am.

OK...onto the good stuff...So today Mimi was watching the girls and I suppose for fun (woohoo!) they checked her blood sugar 1 hour after eating and it came back at 196. In miracle diabetes world, Ella's supposed to be around 180 1 hour after eating. In real diabetes world, we're usually in the mid 200's 1 hour after eating, so 196 is about as close to a modern day miracle as it gets! However, 196 would be considered high if it was 2 hours after eating because there would be no more insulin working in her system to bring it down.

Still with me?

So Mimi sees the 196 flash before her eyes and says to Ella,

 "Let's go outisde and run around and play to get that blood sugar down"

and Ella says,

 "Oh, Mimi...it's only been an hour since my last dose. It takes insulin 2 hours to do its job. You've gotta give it a chance."

And an hour later, she was 117.

Two, one two three four
Everybody's talking about
Bagism, Shagism, Dragism, Madism, Ragism, Tagism
This-ism, that-ism, is-m, is-m, is-m.

All we are saying is give insulin a chance
All we are saying is give insulin a chance

Good job T1 Diabetic Diva, good job.