House party: a play-by-play of diabetes management while drinking

glitzabetes
Sun, 17 Feb 2019 22:38:24 +0000
T1 Teen/College

After the great discussion happening over on Diabetic beer olympics: advice on alcohol use?, I decided to go ahead and share a play-by-play for a (small) house party I played co-host at last night

I will preface it by saying it’s not an absolutely beautiful graph but it it pretty typical for a drinking night for me

1: [8 pm]
We’ll not get into why I was already at a high BG, please just politely ignore that I had Chipotle for dinner, which is not a meal where I nail the bolus most times, haven’t figured that out yet. I have identified that I need an extended bolus for it, because I tend to get later rises, but I have not nailed down what the upfront percentage should be. You can see here that my upfront percentage was definitely too high here. It was also complicated by the fact that I ended up eating a bit less of the burrito bowl than I expected, but the bowl was much fuller than normal, so it complicated my estimation. Basal-IQ ended up cancelling the extended portion and that’ll become relevant later

2: [9:45 pm]
Ended up going lowish (60s) right as people were starting to arrive for the party. Not really having time or attention to keep a close eye on it, I ended up over treating the low, which ultimately caused a high afterward, propped up by the fact that I never remembered to reinstate an extended bolus for the Chipotle. This is also pretty much when I actually started drinking, and when I switched to my drinking pump profile which features a 15% decrease in basals from 12am - 10pm, a lowered ISF from 1:50 to 1:60, and a raised target BG from 100 to 120. For about 50% of the night I was drinking “diet” jungle juice which I had personally made using a mixture of vodkas and diet fruity sodas. (There was a non-diet jungle juice available too, but I didn’t touch it )

This is absolutely not a drink I would recommend to inexperienced drinkers because there is basically no way to tell how much alcohol you are drinking. But, a pro-tip you can take from this is the use of diet mixers. I avoid full-sugar mixed drinks at house parties because they are not worth the energy in trying to combat the rise. At parties I host, I obviously keep diet mixers handy, and at parties I attend, I absolutely brink a bottle of diet something for me to use. (I think a few sugary drinks are somewhat worthwhile when going out to bars because there is less control over the mixers available.) The other 50% of the night I switched to diet mixed drinks which I made in the moment so I could keep a closer control on the actual amount of alcohol.

3: [12:30 am]
Obviously I have been running high (sitting between 200-230) for a few hours, but I have been busy socializing and playing drinking games so I have not kept a close eye on it. At this point I give a correction bolus, using the bolus calculator because I don’t try to drink and dose without it.

4: [2 am]
The party has cleared out and I’m getting ready for bed. I decide on a quick snack, of some white cheddar Smartfood popcorn I had handy. I estimated 20g carbs and bolused accordingly, although I am really not sure whether the quantity of popcorn I ate matched the bolus estimate! You can see that this does seem to help stop a descent from the correction bolus I gave.

By 3am I was peacefully asleep and stayed right around 130-140 for the night, which is definitely somewhere comfortable spot for me if I’ve been drinking

I am not entirely sure how much I drank, but we’ll just say it was enough to get into an emotional heart-to-heart with my friend but not so much that I have more than a mild headache this morning. This isn’t any sort of pure, unadulterated experiment on drinking with diabetes, and my BG was very obviously influenced by other factors but… that’s life

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