Reply to Thread

Guest, we'd love to know what you think about the forum! Take the Diabetes Forum Survey 2025 »

Message: <blockquote data-quote="James472" data-source="post: 2651170" data-attributes="member: 471261">Folks .......... I've got a bit of work to do here, to get through all these posts !  Don't you realise you're interrupting a very intensive cleaning routine !!!OK, so I will try and get through each post, but if I don't manage to give you as full an answer as you feel it deserves, I apologise.  As always, time is a limiting factor.[USER=372207]@Antje77[/USER] , now you realise why I said way back at the top, that I needed to take time to decide how best to put this 'stuff' together - there was no perfect way to do it, and I may have failed in my approach ........But let me handle the basal thing first, coz it seems to be attracting the most attention, and I never posted looking for a solution on basal.  I posted because I could see some interesting trends, and I felt it was time to share what I was seeing, and I also needed more eyes on the picture.  There's simply too much stuff to analyse here, for one person in one house.  It really needs lab work, where you can have e.g. 5 factors, but only altering one at a time, and keep the other 4 factors stable, to observe what changes.  I am doing it, but it's very time consuming, very exhausting, and there's always the risk of misinterpreting, or being subjective instead of objective.OK ........ the basal.I have absolutely no problem with basal - if anybody had suggested not using basal to me years ago, I'd have thought that would be dangerous, possibly very dangerous ?  And I'm not recommending my approach to anyone else - please don't anyone else follow this routine.  This just happens to be what I'm doing, for very specific reasons.Having background basal is as far as I understand, a fairly standard practice in diabetes - it keeps your levels nice and steady when you're not injecting bolus doses, it covers you during the sleeping hours when levels might slowly creep upwards, and to some extent, it sometimes is even enough to allow you to have a small nibble during the day, without absolutely requiring to take a faster bolus dose until later on.  No problem.Now, I'm getting through a fresh 300 unit refill every 1.5-2 days.  So it's around 180-200 units per day, and I'm pretty certain I've been higher than 200 - no kidding.  Every day is pretty horrendous, but some days are just more so.  So I don't think I'm over stating anything when I declare I'm having to deal with a lot of insulin.  If anybody thinks I should just leave the blood glucose levels high, and not worry about chasing with extra doses, then do please step forward now, and explain your rationale.Now, basal isn't going to reduce my insulin requirement.  Basal isn't some magic wand, it's just insulin, but slower.  So if I'm currently needing 180-200 units, I'll still need that, except some of it will be bolus and some basal.  But that's a large amount, so proportionately, if you want basal to perform its normal function, it will need to be a sizeable dose of basal.Except that, in my situation, where I am doing this investigative test, and from time to time, finding periods (which includes sleep times) where I get much improved flatlines, not requiring so much insulin, that starts to become more dangerous, having a large dose of basal taking me even lower through the night.  Now, I know someone will say ........ oh, but you could allow the Libre to alert you during sleep etc. etc.  Yes, that is a possible option, except I preferred to stay on the initial version of the reader, as I found with the newer reader, because it was communicating so much, it seemed to keep needing recharged much more often.  I'm sure that's what it was, so I have the newer reader, but preferred to stick with original reader.  But that doesn't matter, that's my choice.  And in any case, if I was too tired, and too deep in sleep, I could miss the alert of the new reader.I just don't want to have a large dose of basal running in the background when my bloods drop suddenly as they do when I eliminate the 'unknown issue'.3 scenarios:Diabetic on relatively low amounts of insulin (maybe not a heavy carb eater), and the diabetes is stable or even a little erratic, but not too much - yes, basal would be a normal part of the equation.Diabetic on high amounts of insulin, but stable, BG readings are consistent and dependable - yes, basal would definitely be wanted, otherwise your in-between readings, and particularly your night time readings could climb to undesirable levels.Diabetic on high amounts of insulin, but totally unstable, up and down all 24 hours long - I would suggest not upping basal too much, or you could cause more of a problem.  Particularly if they can drop like a stone, the way mine do once I eliminate the source problem.I do agree with all of you that basal is the norm, but I'm simply not running a 'norm' right now, and haven't been since March / April 2016.  If I could get in a time capsule and go back, I would - I really don't want to be dealing with this.(having some tech posting problems at the moment - not sure if I've included some kind of formatting error or something - but hopefully this one will post OK).  OK, for some reason, it's not accepting my Smilies ???</blockquote>

Verification

Top Bottom

Search

Search

Reply to Thread