Hi,
@Scarlett91 , I'd second
@himtoo ,s recommendation of Think...
Another good one is Sugar Surfing by Stephen Ponder. It's aimed more at people using cgm and libre. There's some interesting stuff going on at the moment about Libre being on the nhs, remains to be seen how that'll pan out, but if you're able to afford 100 quid per month in the meantime, it's well worth the money, because you can see in real time how your bg is moving and do something about it before you go out if range. Strips alone just don't do that.
Breakthrough... by Thea Cooper is also good for keeping perspective. Will tell you **** all about managing T1 but it explains the discovery of insulin and makes me feel **** lucky I'm T1 now and not back then in the 1920's.
One thing to bear in mind is that T1 is inherently unpredictable. Sure, carb counting etc is a good starting point which improves your odds, but as soon as you inject insulin and eat food, there's a million and one other bodily chemical/biological processes going on which might throw your careful calculations out.
Don't get dispirited about that, it's just the way it works. You've not failed if you end up too low or high. It might be because you've miscalced, easy to do given the number of variables involved, but it might also be because some random bodily processes which you can't measure have gotten in the way. So just do what you need to do to bring bg back up or down, reflect on why it might have happened, save that info in the back of your mind to build what eventually becomes native T1 "intuition" , "gut feel", or "winging it", and move on.
You're newly dx'd, you've maybe got some honeymoon period going on (the beta cells in the Islets of Langherans in your pancreas, which make insulin, decide to have one last go at making insulin), so I'm not going to suggest anything contrary to what your docs say.
But, after a while, you might be asked whether you want to go on a DAFNE course.
The very general rules you'll learn there are that:
1 unit of insulin will drop you by 2 to 3 on your meter.
10 grams of carbs will raise you by 2 to 3 on your meter.
On the face of it, you would, therefore, have 1 u for each 10g to keep stable. But those are just general rules. Good starting points for newbies, but after you spend a bit of time messing about with strips or cgm, you might find that different numbers work better for you. Me, personally, 10 g will raise me by about 2.5, but I need 1.5 u for each 10g. Less or more for other people, you need to experiment to find out what's right for you.
If it all gets too much, google Eva Saxl. She fled Eastern Europe during the war because the Nazis wanted to kill her because she was Jewish, ended up in Shanghai, only to find that the Japanese invasion cut off insulin supplies. Did she curl up and die? Did she f*ck. She and her husband Victor figured out a way of making insulin from scratch from water buffalo pancreases in a make shift basement lab. Whenever I'm feeling down about T1, I try to imagine Eva turning up and slapping me around the head a bit - "oy vey, oy vey, you just need to go to the chemist or eat some sugar, I had to make it from scratch
during a war!".
