Glimpses of 5 a.m.

It’s funny, when you’re in it, how abnormal things actually feel normal.  It didn’t seem odd for even a minute that I got up at 5 a.m. and made my way downstairs, barefoot, even though our thermostat is set at 54 degrees overnight.  I stood by the snack cabinet and ate one rice crispy treat left over from the batch Pete made for a football game with the guys, followed by two of the chocolate cookies I baked for us.  As I sat down to pet K.C., who follows me everywhere regardless of time, it seemed completely normal to get up in the wee hours of the morning to eat sugary junk.

Then, out of habit or instinct, I took a look at my CGM graph.  I blinked a few time and squinted, but it definitely said “Below 40”.  Nothing made much sense, but I went back to the snack cabinet and ate four more cookies.  As I stood for a few minutes, my mind started to clear and fragments of memories now came into focus.  I remembered ignoring the big drops of sweat that had poured off of me when I ate my rice crispy treat and wondered how they didn’t strike me as odd.  I realized how hard it had been to get down the stairs, and suddenly recalled gripping the railing as I slowly made my way down and realized how out of the ordinary that is.  Then I remembered being low at dinner time, and being annoyed that my pump kept suspending me while I was eating so I turned off the Threshold Suspend option . . . . and apparently forgot to turn it back on once my blood sugar came up.  I also found my low alarms muted, although I don’t remember doing that at all.  My blood sugars have been completely borked by a bad cold that’s been plaguing me, and apparently has me so exhausted that I turned off my alarms in a sleepy germy (and probably low) haze that I don’t even recall.

I’m very thankful and lucky to have some of the latest tools to help manage diabetes.  But the fact remains, I’m still human with an imperfect brain that can interfere with the safety net of these tools in an imperfect way.  It’s still really a crapshoot of hoping my instinct will kick in when rationale doesn’t, sending me downstairs to eat whatever I can find.  Sometimes it just feels like it’s still all in the hands of fate.  So I made my way back to bed, woke up Pete to tell him I had a bad low but was okay, and tested to see a 42 flashing back at me.  I turned my CGM alarms and suspend function back on as I waited to come back to a safe range for sleep, and tried not to think too hard about what could have been.