I wish I could give you hope that it will be soon, but my 14 year old’s growth hormones are completely insane. Unfortunately, they only happen 3/5 days, or we would up his basal. Instead, we wake up at 1 am and check the dexcom on the phone, if he is over 250, we wake him up and have him dose. Can be really frustrating. Can’t wait until we hit a more steady state time.
Chris, what is your current regimen? Are you using a pump or MDI?
Eric, we are using a pump. But my son doesn’t want anyone but himself to deliver insulin, and my wife and I are fine with that. So we wake him up and he ups his basal for the wild nights.
Sure, that makes sense. I am with him on it. I don’t want anyone messing with my body either. When I have to get blood tests, I always ask them if I can insert the needle and draw the blood (they always say no)!
The reason I asked is because you mentioned the nighttime spikes, I was wondering if there was anything you could do to help that. Does your son participate in sports? Is there any pattern to it you can figure out?
We have tried. We review his Dexcom reports as a family every two weeks looking for patterns. Yes, he is in sports, Baseball 5 days a week in the spring/summer, Soccer in the Fall, Couch potato for Dec-Feb. Does the olympic lifts when not during baseball season.
Top graph nothing was done, he went up around 1 am and then came down and went low with no treatment.
Bottom graph, starting going up around 1 am and alarm woke my wife up at 2:45 am, woke him up and he treated. 3/5 days look like the bottom graph, can’t pinpoint why yet.
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It is tough to figure these things out.
Because it is so unpredictable, a lot of times an assumption is made that there is “no reason” for it. I have heard this from numerous professionals in the diabetes profession.
I don’t agree with them. There is always a reason, but sometimes we can’t nail it down.
Keep track of whatever you can. Exertion level, stress, tests or school projects that are due, amount of food, high or low BG during the day, whether you were surprised that he seemed to need either more or less insulin than expected for a meal during that day. And particularly because it is my favorite subject, how much energy he spent in sports that day. There are so many things to consider!
My nighttime varies a lot also because of different levels of exertion during the day. And one clue I have figured out is that I don’t need to wait until 3 or 4 am to see it. I can start to feel it earlier, like 9 or 10 pm. So I have become much bolder in proactively changing basal amounts before I ever need them. And it feels great when you can outsmart the disease because you bumped up your basal before your BG became too high.
Much of it defies normal logic, but digging deeper reveals reasons.This would be a great topic to discuss sometime.
Thanks Eric, I will ask him to start predicting before he goes to bed which way it will go. If he can feel it, we will treat it. The only nice dia news we got around all of this, is that in the last 3 months, even with these nighttime issues, he managed to lower his A1c from 7.7 to 7.0 while growing 1.5 inches.
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!! That is great !!
That is great.
Just like in life, the times with diabetes that I regret most are when I had a strong instinct and didn’t have the guts to follow it.
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