Rolling the Dice

Last night we attended the community pool party for all of the baseball and softball teams in town.  This event, as with most of the activities at this time of year, is a food-fest.

My daughter began the party with an undesirable blood sugar of about 260.  With that corrected, she promptly unplugged her pump and got in the pool.  Half an hour later she emerged to air which was colder than the water. She was chilled, and I envisioned her blood sugar creeping even higher as a result.

Dinner was served, consisting of pizza, some fritos, some doritos, and a token portion of raw veggies with dip. My bolus calculation involved thoughts like, 'the pizza crust seems thin-ish,' and 'eh...those chips look like about 12 carbs I guess.'

Ordinarily at this point, I would have insisted on a somewhat 'countable' dessert.  But a team-mate brought a big tub of italian ice from a great local ice cream shop.  It was too fun to resist. 

Fortunately, I'd overheard talk of this plan at a weekend game, so had looked up a generic italian ice carb count.  Eyeballing my child's enormous portion of frozen goodness, and mushing it around in my mind's eye to fit into an imaginary measuring cup, I crossed my fingers and bolused an enormous amount of insulin.

An hour of running around on the playground brought her back to the table claiming she was 'starving.' Once the team awards were handed out, a handful of fritos was taken for the road. We headed to the car, two hours after the initial 260 blood sugar mark.

With much trepidation, I handed her the glucometer.  "Let's see what happened," I said.

"Ninety-eight."

I made her repeat it, thinking I'd perhaps  missed the first number which surely should be a two or a three.

"NINETY-EIGHT, MOMMY."

I'm certain that no diabetes expert would suggest the preceding course of events as the best way to lower one's glucose level 162 points. While I'm happy when a moment like this comes our way, I'm convinced that much of it is just a lucky roll of the dice.