This Friday has Been Better Than Last Friday (so far)

We woke up at 2am this morning to check my step son’s blood sugar.  The reading was really good.  At a little before 6am we took it again before breakfast and again it was good.  We calculated his insulin dose based on what he was going to have for breakfast and I drew it for him.  My hands were thankfully not shaking in fear as I did so (although it was a close call).  He’s using an app to track his readings, meals, and insulin intake.  I checked it a few minutes ago to see how he was at lunch and they have a blood sugar spike at just after 9am.  He was probably checking before gym and the nurse gave him a correction dose.  His lunch numbers were good again, but I’m going to be worrying about that morning spike.  Did I do something wrong?  I don’t think so, but did I?

Whatever it was, it wasn’t nearly as awful as last Friday.  He went into diabetic ketoacidosis, or DKA.  If you want to scare the living shit out of yourself go and webmd that little bastard.  Then imagine it’s your wife’s 12 year old kid who you’ve known since age four and see if your heart doesn’t stop a few times.  Try hearing an ER nurse tell you that he is one seriously sick kid, and then hear an endocrinologist tell you that in 30 years he’d never seen anyone that sick.  Go on, I dare you.  I double dog dare you.

Things are normal now.  Note that I didn’t say ‘back to normal’ as we have to define a new normal.  We test blood sugar before each meal and again at 2am (which is probably temporary).  At school he goes to the nurse to get checked before lunch, gym class, and before he gets on the bus to go home.  He takes a long acting insulin dose at 9:30pm, and short acting insulin doses before each meal.  Those are the minimums.  There is nothing wrong with him taking his blood sugar reading every 10 minutes if he wants, except that we’d run out of strips and he’d have pin holes all over his fingers.  Extra insulin doses are possible but you run the risk of giving him a dose based on a blood sugar reading taken while the previous fast acting dose is still working (about three hours).  That can be bad.

That’s the routine at least.  We haven’t been doing this long enough to need to vary the routine.  Meaning, what if you go out to dinner?  How do you count carbs in a restaurant?  What if we go on a day trip or something, or even on a vacation?  Also, we’ve seen what high blood sugar looks like, but we haven’t seen low blood sugar yet and that is supposed to be worse.

Every time I start thinking about this I start getting overwhelmed.  Hell, this post was supposed to be about the new Rush live album that came out today.  When I start feeling like this though I have to stop myself and look at things objectively.  We are dealing with a boy who is adamant about handling all of this.  He wants to do it all himself.  Readings, counting carbs, injections, logging results, everything.  He seems to be seeing this as a challenge and he is so very up to it.  He also has two parents, two step parents, and a big sister who are all with him 100%.  We are all going to work together to make sure that boy has as normal a life as any boy.  This isn’t going to stop him.  You watch.  10 years from now he’s going to be working at Apple designing new features for OS X and iOS that will blow your mind clear out of your skull.  Count on it.  Screw diabetes, this kid is going places.