You know how sometimes, no matter how hard you seem to try and how much work you put into making sure that you get everything as close as humanly possible to perfect, your levels are still a nightmare?

At various times since I’ve been a diabetic, I find that my levels seem to get a mind of their own and go totally haywire with complete disregard to the amount of effort that I put in.

I’m a fairly active sort of person so I don’t have endless time at my fingertips (pun intended) to be able to test incessantly but I always make sure that I carb count everything that I can when it’s possible by weighing it on scales (I don’t trust average servings) and being as attentive as possible to alcohol, exercise and so on. That said, despite all this, sometimes I just don’t seem to be able to get it right.

It makes me wonder:

1. How many hypos does a normal, average Joe/Jane diabetic have in a week
2. If you had to choose between having highs or lows, what would you choose? And why?
3. Where do you draw the line between having great control and having a life that isn’t ruled by the regimen of testing, counting and juggling? That must be a real challenge for parents of T1 kids right?

My diabetes nurse has told me several times that I should be having no more than 1-2 hypos a week on a pump which sounds simultaneously idyllic and totally unachievable. Or, is it?

Like I said,  these things come in waves and right now, everything is going super well but…there are those times that I don’t seem to be able to not go low or high. Personally, I’d rather be lower because it doesn’t inflict the same long-term health damage as being high, it’s easier and faster to fix and it doesn’t make me feel so sick overall but how do you guys do it and what is normal for adults? At what point do we say that we are doing good enough?

According to Aaron Kowalski (which isn’t a pseudonym I promise – he is actually research director of the Artificial Pancreas Project at JDRF which Nic talked about in her post ‘A New artificial pancreas in the making‘):

“Even the most sophisticated people with diabetes only spend 30 percent of the time in their blood sugar range, and it’s often much less than that.”

I would love to know what he defines as the ideal range but it does raise the questions for me…where is the ground between what’s ideal and what’s realistic?

- Aaron

P.S. For those of you know know I’m a twin, the title has nothing to do with that!

You know how sometimes, no matter how hard you seem to try and how much work you put into making sure that you get everything as close as humanly possible to perfect, your levels are still a nightmare?

At various times since I’ve been a diabetic, I find that my levels seem to get a mind of their own and go totally haywire with complete disregard to the amount of effort that I put in.

I’m a fairly active sort of person so I don’t have endless time at my fingertips (pun intended) to be able to test incessantly but I always make sure that I carb count everything that I can when it’s possible by weighing it on scales…

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