The Adrenaline Was A No-Show

Last year's school musical provided us a glimpse into how blood sugar can be influenced by adrenaline. Last year's performance excitement led to numbers in the 300's both nights of the show.  These highs, it turned out, needed very little insulin to correct them.  Having learned from our mistakes, we put together a game plan for this show. I was particularly concerned since this year's role involved first lines in the middle of the first act but a more significant part including solo singing during the second half.  If my daughter's blood sugar spiked in Act I, we needed to be very careful not to over-correct.

I was excited, in a nerdy science-y sort of way, to watch the Dexcom graph.  Would her blood sugar start to go up before the show as she started to think about being on stage, or not until she was the one in the spotlight?  Would it start to go down again as she relaxed during intermission, or would it stay up through the show?  How would our game plan to keep her from having a performance impacting high without causing a performance impacting low work out? How cool would it be to be able to use the Dexcom information from opening night to tweak our game plan for the next day?

We'll never know. We talk often about how everybody's experience with diabetes is different.  Activities and foods which may spike or tank one person's blood sugar may have no affect on another's.  What makes even less sense to me is that one person's own experience with diabetes can vary over time.

This year's blood sugar impact?  A gentle decrease throughout the show despite an intermission snack of three glucose tabs (yum) each day.  Mysterious, indeed.  While last year's show was her first, this year's role was significantly bigger, even involving running off stage for a stressful costume change in the middle of a solo song.  The spotlight was directly on her for several minutes at a time.  My adrenaline was pumping just watching her!

Whether you're a boy scout or not, today's diabetes lesson is this:  be prepared.  We did everything in our power to ensure a quality blood sugar number for the start of the show. She had her pump's meter remote backstage so she could gently correct the anticipated high blood sugar through her costume.  We arranged to text during intermission to decide a dose.  Fortunately, we'd planned for any eventuality. Her bag was also stocked with plenty of glucose tabs and juice boxes.  We were quickly able to switch gears to prevent an onstage low blood sugar.  Otherwise she'd have had to rely on Willy Wonka's pink candy boat, and Willy would have had to admonish her once again:

"Violet, please do NOT lick the boat.  You'll only make the ship sticky."