Bad News

I started with the good news: Monday's post about my daughter inserting her infusion set all by herself for the first time.  It was a great moment.  I wish we could have spent the weekend celebrating.

Sadly, there was bad news to balance the good: the absorption rate for this hard-won site varied from 'I don't think this site works at all' to 'OMG we might not have enough juice to make it through the night.'

Sunday was our first-ever three juice box night.

We experienced things over the life span of this leg site that we have never experienced in 12+ years of diabetes. We saw our first significant residual lows from exercise. We spent two nights trying to keep up with those lows. Alternately, we gave corrections for highs which would not budge without accompanying activity.

The site went in on Saturday morning.  It followed a site which had certainly reached the end of its usefulness, so there was a residual high there, combined with a residual high from an evening at a friend's house dining on chicken fingers, munchkins and cookies.  It was a lazy Saturday morning.  Our intense desire for this site to be a success led us to chalk Saturday morning's highs up to that variety of factors and to leave the new site in despite some concerns about its effectiveness.  Around 1, I walked her to a friend's house where I left her with a blood sugar hovering in the 250's.   An hour of Just Dance on the Wii led to double down arrows on the Dexcom and some barely covered snacks.  She was still low overnight (at least 8 hours post-exercise) and needed juice and some temp basals to keep her going.

We figured we'd overcorrected for the morning and mid-day highs and that it had simply all caught up with her.  

But by mid-Sunday morning, she was high again.  It was another sedentary morning, maybe that was the issue. We've been seeing a mid-morning creep up this week anyway, so maybe it was a pattern we needed to address?  We remained reluctant to pull the site and dampen the excitement of having inserted it to begin with. After lunch, both frustrated with the high and happy to see the sun, we walked around the park: a little over a mile.  By 3, she was headed straight down, but evened out around 80 through dinner time.  She didn't really crash until after 10 at which point there was no turning it around. That night was our first ever 3 juice box night.

Monday was still streaky, but better, I imagine because of a more steady pattern of intermittent activity and rest.  It still felt  like all of our usual issues were magnified exponentially.  The post-breakfast spike was higher and the post-gym slope was steeper.

I'm thinking that this leg site thing is not for my child, at least not on the weekends.  In case of emergency, sure.  If she's 30 miles away from me and her site rips out, and that's where she's most comfortable putting in a replacement?  Fine. Otherwise, I might think twice.  This weekend was a tough one.

Except for the part where she inserted a site all by herself, of course.  Which is still amazing and still the most important part of the whole story.

*As always, but particularly since this is a very specific post, please don't take this as medical advice.  In addition to the usual reasons for this caution, please note that due to the fallout from this debacle, I have not slept much and am running primarily on coffee, strong tea and dark chocolate.  Leg sites might be just the thing for you.  Another leg site might be just the thing for us.  The only point I'll stand by is that affirming the bright side of having your kid insert her first infusion set should outweigh any complaining you do about the results.