How do you change your settings after a sick day? Samson had that period about 2 weeks ago where he was running super super high (like using 25 units a day). His numbers settled down. Then, a day later, he barfed.
Since then he’s been running super low. We have been waiting to bolus for any of his food. But the moment we try even a tiny bit (say he normally gets 1.6 units for his lunch, he gets 0.3) and he crashes super super low. He was just tested on finger stick at 44 at school, and the annoying director was like “if he’s going to be this volatile he can’t be here.”
Anyways, I’m trying to figure out how to tweak his settings to avoid this. But I’m curious; How do you tweak your settings during and after a stomach bug?
What percent of your normal basal do you use? And do you use any carbF? How do you correct highs – do you use the same ISF?
Since we prefer highs over lows (we don’t want either, but if given a choice, we’ll take the high), we always just don’t bolus at all until his sugars are already on the way up. If he’s sick, we wait until he’s over 150 to even give anything so that we have time to correct if they fall down again quickly. That’s how we deal with it with Liam.
If he’s crashing and any amount of insulin is causing him to go low and stay low, we may turn off basal all together. We do this frequently during the nights.
Yes, we don’t tweak these things, we just delay when he’s bolused until we know he’s headed up, or already up.
I just went through this myself. I had to stop basal completely and bolus small amounts (1 unit at a time) untill i started coming down. Not fun, one evening went to 200+ from bowel of chicken soup, boluses 1 unit every 2 hours 3 times, started going down, went to under 40 for 6 hours, was asleep didn’t notice until I awoke.
Coming down from the flu this past week, I had 24 hours of lows a few days after my symptoms and insulin resistance stopped. For me, I would doubt that these lows were due to my pancreas starting up as @Chris suggested just because I was diagnosed 16 years ago. It may just be an extreme sensitivity to insulin once the immune system ramps down from the sickness ?
I put my basal to 75% and 75% for boluses but ended up treating lows after meals. I think 50% for my boluses would’ve done better. This only lasted for 24 hours for me then my insulin requirements went back to my normal.
it’s crazy because he last threw up on Tuesday. So it’s been over a week and he’s still running super low. And the fact that he was running so high (like 250% of his normal) three days prior to the stomach bug was also super weird. He also got a weird rash on his face in those days.
His highs may be matching up with when he was first exposed to and was trying to fight off whatever infection he had. A week of lows is definitely weird and scary. I haven’t experienced that before, but each person and each infection is different. There could be some hormonal fluctuations he’s dealing with now?
That’s possible but I don’t think so – the rash was really spotty and not symmetrical, and all the pictures I’m seeing make it look just like really rosy cheeks.
