How to Lose my Mind . . .

Fasting blood sugar - fine.  Bolus for and consume coffee.

Pre-breakfast blood sugar - fine.  Pre-bolus for breakfast smoothie.  Make and drink breakfast smoothie.  Blood sugar remains stable.

Two and a half hours after drinking breakfast smoothie - CGM high alarm.  Test to confirm, and yes, I am high.  I figure it’s the smoothie, even though it seems odd that the spike didn’t start sooner.  Whatever.  Take the 1 unit suggested correction and head the the grocery store.  The grocery store is a drag, but I’m secretly happy to go because grocery shopping always brings my blood sugar down.

Come home from grocery shopping, put everything away, dust the entire house.  Still high.  Hmmm, that’s odd.  Correct again and set a higher temp basal for good measure.

CGM high alarm repeat is set to 1 hour, meaning that it will alarm once an hour as long as I remain high.  All afternoon it continues to blare hour upon hour upon hour, despite continuing to up my basal bit by bit.  At 4:00 I finally admit that the 200+ blood sugar I’ve been stuck with all day can’t be due to the smoothie I drank at 8:30.  Decide to change my site, and am happy to see that it’s also time to open a new bottle of insulin.  Yay for eliminating two variable at once!

Insert new site, but it feels “weird” going in.  Not sure exactly what I mean by that, but my gut tells me something isn’t quite right.  Already frustrated enough that I haven’t been able to make my blood sugar budge all day, so immediately pull the new site and replace it again.  Then take a 20 minute walk, confident that I’ve now got this under control.

Two hours later blood sugar is STILL the same and that confidence I felt is replaced by complete exasperation.  Curse the fact that I keep forgetting to check for ketones, and give in to the temptation to rage bolus.  When even that doesn’t help, decide it’s time to do a third site change.  Pull the practically new site and it looks fine, but a few small drops of blood dribble out of my body.  Insert new site yet again and call husband and cry.

Finally make it into the 190s.  Pretty sure it’s a bad idea but decide to eat dinner anyway.  Eat a half portion and test again to see that I’m in the 120s.  Yay!!  Eat the other half of my dinner!

Watch a little TV with Pete.  We chat a bit and then he says “Do you think you're low?  You kind of sound like you're low?”.  I’m sure I’m not low but agree to test before getting up to wash the dishes.  41.  WTF.  (Also, what is this "sound low" symptom Pete can spot??)  Must be falling fast because CGM shows me in the 80s, but soon after the rapid down arrows appear.  Eat but still feel like I’m going to die.  Curl up in a ball on the couch while Pete is stuck doing the dishes.  At this moment, I feel like I absolutely can not live one more day with diabetes.

There are many hard things about life with diabetes, and this is one that people outside of the diabetes bubble probably just don’t understand.  I’d stick a million needles a day in my body - that pain only lasts for a moment.  But the emotional pain of trying every single thing you can think of to get your blood sugar back into range and nothing works?  Knowing that people think diabetes is no big deal because you just need to take your insulin and not eat sugar and that’s it?  On days like this one, these are the parts of diabetes that will truly make me lose my flippin’ mind.