By Oliver Shane

Hey everyone, welcome back to the Poetic Diabetic!. Today I want to talk about something we all experience: a week during which nothing seems to go right with managing our T1D.

Diabetes can be (and pardon my French here), a sucky illness. I haven’t felt that sentiment any stronger than over the past week or so, where I’ve had my worst continuous hyperglycemic episode since diagnosis.

Honestly, it was downright bizarre how volatile my levels were. I would be at a normal level like 130 to 150, and just by having a munchkin or two (I reserve my right to indulge), I could rocket all the way up to the high 200s. Even worse, my levels would stay in this accursed limbo for hours at a time. If I ate a dinner with any semblance of a carbohydrate, you bet I’d have to wake up at three in the morning to issue a correction bolus.

And since I’m only human, waking up in the middle of the night,  night after night, had some rather detrimental effects on my health outside of my diabetes. I would wake up every day, feeling no more rested than I had the night before, and my lethargy would continue well into the evening and subsequent days.

This lack of sleep, combined with the symptoms of hyperglycemia, was the leading contributor to what I like to call my “zombification” process. From an outsider’s perspective, I might’ve just seemed grouchy or tired or moody, but the truth was a bit more than that. I was absolutely exhausted, and my brain failed to compute even the most basic of thoughts without basically short-circuiting. It was like operating on autopilot, while still being expected to take up the mantle of the usual high-school workload.

I noticed the issue had gotten extremely concerning when I fell asleep during my Spanish exam. I knew I wasn’t feeling great, thought that moment was the one that convinced me to start making an active change. Thus began my short experimental period, where I’d mess around with injection sites, basal levels, and even different types of insulins. Through this flurry of changes, I kinda lost track of which exact change fixed my levels. Regardless, by Sunday, my levels were, at least, normalizing.

An important lesson can be gleaned from this: even people who may seem to have their diabetes under control can have bad days, or even bad weeks;. iIt just goes to show how unpredictable this illness can be.

See you all soon, from one diabetic to another!