One of the crazy-making aspects of managing this disease is not being able to predict it.
One of the aspects that I’ve found most curious is this concept of a honeymoon period. I’d be curious to hear from others who have experienced this. How would you describe your honeymoon? And perhaps more importantly, how did you know when it was over?
Honeymoon phase was awesome, it lasted about 8 months. During this time, we were able to quite easily manage his disease with MDI, we had a few lows, but really only a couple a week. It was as if we could no wrong with dosing, unless we really screwed up and gave too much. During this period our A1c went from almost 12 at diagnosis to the 6’s with little effort. Sure we had some high’s and lows, but I would describe the disease as “easy to treat” although it didn’t seem so at the time because of the learning curve.
At the end of the honeymoon phase, we were hit with two factors, the first was much much more variability in numbers. It was easier to get high, and we have many more lows each week without trying. We also have times where his hormone system seems to drive him low for some reason, i.e. right around bedtime earlier this week everything was stable and recovered after an early dinner and then suddenly 60 double arrow down with only residual dinner insulin onboard (wtf).
This has been combined with a big teenage growth phase (male 14 yo), where 2/3 nights tons of growth hormone get dumped into his system around 1-2 am leading to highs over 300 that are difficult to bring down.
It was the end of the honeymoon phase that caused us to consider moving to pump therapy. After we got that dialed in, it has been easier, but certainly not easy.