"Pumping Insulin" - Basal Rate Testing

A week from today is my next endo appointment.  It will have been three months since I saw him last.  I never in a million years thought I'd say what I'm about to say now . . .  I can't wait to see what my A1C is.  Wow, imagine that!!  But yes, for once I'm (cautiously) optimistic that I will see a big improvement.



No matter how good (or not) my A1C results are,  reading "Pumping Insulin" has me raring to do some basal rate testing.  I think my basal rate are really good, but I also think they can be tweaked a bit  to really nail things down.  I often go pretty low throughout the morning.   And sometimes high before dinner.  A smidge less insulin here and a smidge more there could make things easier.



So last night, I used what I learned from Chapter 11, "Select and Test your Basal Rates", to run my first over-night basal test.  When testing daytime rates, you monitor your blood sugar every two hours.  During the over-night test, the book says you only need to test every four hours.  But because I'm crazy . . .  an over-achiever . . .  very interested to see exactly what is going on while I sleep, I decided to get up and check every two hours.  At bed-time I found myself higher than usual (153).  Since I wanted to run the test, I decided to leave it rather than bolus a correction.  At 1am, I had risen a bit more. At 3am, I was back down to where I had started.  At 5am I was down a bit more.  And at 7am, I ended my test with a 101.  Ah ha, if I had gone to bed at 100, I may well have ended my test down at 48.  Yup, a little tweaking may be needed.



I love knowing that the pump will allow me to make the slight changes I might need to keep things stable over-night.  It's empowering to know I can run these tests and really act on the results I get.  I plan to do another test Tuesday night, and bring both results in for discussion at next week's visit.  But for now, I just need another cup of coffee.