Sounds like a fifties do-wop group, right? WRONG! So I haven't posted in forever, the pump has worked great. She has so much freedom and other than the initial changing of the insets she uses, it has done what it's supposed to do. We did a site change Sunday morning and her numbers were fine throughout the day. Monday morning she wakes up and says, "my stomach hurts." She tests her BG which is like 487. WOW - must be the McDonald's she ate for dinner plus the combo of her not feeling good. When she feels bad, the BG is always high. She eats breakfast, throws it up. "Oh yes, it is a stomach bug," I tell myself. At lunch she's in the 300s, dinner in the high 270s, before bed 300s. I keep putting her on a temp basal to keep her BG down because I think she's sick with a bug.
Man she's fighting something....Get a clue. She sleeps with me so I can keep an eye on her all night, and by morning, the cat is all up in her face enjoying her ketone breath and she keeps telling me, I feel low. We test and she's high....and then it dawns on me....
ketones! I'm not testing ketones, maybe her site's not working, maybe she's sick because she has ketones. And I think back to the weekend before she was dx'd and I remember that I thought she had a tummy bug then because she was throwing up everything. She had ketones then, of course, but I didn't know it. So, we test ketones with a ketostik and low and behold, she's the darkest color on there. We refer to the trusty 'betes binder and we see that if she's shedding, we have to call it in. I give her a shot, and promptly change her pump site. The NP tells me once I talk to her that I did everything right that I just need to remember next time, after the 2nd high reading, test ketones. We've done this before, but she was sick with a head cold. We test for ketones and she's negative everytime. I just chalked her high numbers up to her being sick and didn't think about DKA until she's 24 hours into it.
So we're taking blood sugar readings every 2 hours and she's testing her urine for ketones each time, as well. At lunch, still high and still dark on the ketostik. Two and a half hours later, 247 and negative ketones on the stick. The nurse said it would take all day to shake it, but I think she's close to being done. She's drinking tons of water and is ready to go to dance tonight. I'm kicking myself because I didn't catch that she was in DKA soon enough. The NP said "you weren't as paranoid as you need to be." And she's right, I'm usually more neurotic when it comes to her symptoms. But in her next sentence she said "this was your first experience with it, you live and learn with diabetes everyday." True dat.
I see what you did there, diabetes, and now I know...if she's throwing up, and claims to feel low when her BG is crazy high, then it's not a tummy bug, she needs a site change. Or I can just put the cat in front of her mouth and he can tell me. I swear, I'm looking into getting a dog that detects all that stuff. Maybe I can train him to do a site change, too.
