We all go through it, we, people with diabetes. The awful spikes that happen after you eat a scrumptious meal, that many of us battle to get back down to normal range. But how do you manage it.
Quite honestly, I didn’t even think about it a few months ago. If it came down, it came down, if it didn’t… I’d give myself a little more insulin and wait. Was I concerned? Not really.
Now, a few months later, if I’m not within a certain range after eating, I’m bolusing and waiting for those numbers to come back to where they need to be. At this point, it’s because I’m growing a child in my abdomen that I’m so preoccupied and worried about my numbers.
Surprisingly, getting to know your body throughout this journey becomes more intense. Changing basal rates and testing things out is now second nature, because although I do see an endo monthly, I’m still knowledgeable enough on how I feel and an expert on my own body to know what I should and shouldn’t do, along with what I can handle.
Aside from this “Dawn Phenomenon” I’d only heard about but never experienced until now. My blood sugars also spike in the middle of the night/early morning around 2 a.m. for no apparent reason. This has been a common event for some time since I’ve been pregnant and it wasn’t until the last couple days that I decided to up my basal rate at 1 a.m. to see how I’d fair. Not only did this keep me steady for the whole night, but it also helped with the “Dawn Phenomenon” that still happened, but my sugar didn’t go as high as it normally does. The highest this morning was 115 before I ate a hard boiled egg to settle the power of the liver.
I think I had mentioned this in the previous blog, however, my endo explained that while you sleep your hormone levels are balancing themselves out. Not only is your body dealing with additional hormones, but in the morning, your liver is dishing out glucose because you haven’t eaten in hours and another little being is probably hungry. The power of balance.
Either way, this is just one thing that annoyed me that I finally got control of and hopefully it stays that way, even though something tells me that with the changing body, it won’t. At the very least, I know how to manage and work things for myself.
The other issue is managing to get blood glucose levels down to 120 two hours after eating. WHAT?! Before pregnancy, I didn’t even think of it. It’d come down eventually, right? Unfortunately, with pregnancy and all the other wild changes going on in the body, it’s not so simple.
A few years ago, my doctor put me on Metformin because I was showing signs of insulin resistance. Currently, it’s helping more than I thought it would, so I have that going for me.
So what do you do?
- Take insulin about 20- 45 minutes before eating to avoid those spikes. There’s that sweet spot when your BG is dropping but not quickly, and where you’re still stable and you can eat peacefully while also clearing the fact that you won’t spike after your meal. If you hit that, it’s golden.
- Go for a walk after a meal to make sure everything is working and you’re burning off what you already ate — kinda?
- Take any additional medications to help with the insulin resistance and controlling the numbers?
I plan on taking a lot of these learnings with me after I have this child of mine. It feels good to be in control and feeling “high” at 150.
What have you learned? Anything that you’ve taken with you from the 9 months of instant learning experience?
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