Hello David
The way to see if your basal dose is correct or not is to inject it whenever (at night?) but don't eat any food during the hours from midnight to 6 or 7am when you get up from sleeping. Ideally, get up in the night about 3am and do a blood glucose test just to see what your levels are. Ideally, your blood sugar levels should stay somewhere between 5.5 - 6.5mmol all night long. If your blood sugars are going towards being on 8mmol at 3am, you have to ask yourself if its because you've eaten a carb snack about 10.30pmish because your blood glucose was too low to go to bed on (3.5 - 5.5) and its that that has made your levels rise or if you haven't eaten a snack, do you need to increase the evening basal dose up by 0.5 to 1.0u and then with any luck, your 3am blood glucose reading will be a bit lower. If you stay up all night (nightwork?) you do unfortunately need to test bg levels and if you want to fast to test basal effect out on its own, you could possibly scoff loads of sugar free jelly?
Where basal testing is concerned, its important to note that drinking milk in cups of tea or coffee will alter bg readings, so you've got to take that into consideration when altering the basal insulin dose.
Using basal bolus insulins is not at all easy to begin with and that is why lots of diabetics have gained better control by using an insulin to carb ratio which can be adjusted to suit what bg level is ideal for you to achieve. The ONLY way of finding everything out though is by testing bg levels every 2.5hrs, writing down the amount of carb eaten and also the bolus insulin injected and then by dividing the amount of bolus insulin into the amount of carb eaten will be the ratio that you can use as long as the bg levels stay within healthy targets like 6 - 6.5mmol before eating food, then 2.5hrs later - 8.5mmol, then 2hrs later - roughly about 5 - 7mmol again. You just keep adjusting the insulin to carb ratios until you are able to achieve healthy bg levels. To work out a correction factor in case your bg levels are way above being ideal - look at the 100 rule (google 100 rule diabetes correction) and then you'll see how to use it. Until you are able to find out what your ideal Total Daily Dose is - TDD, work on a correction of 1u to lower you by 3mmol so if your bg level is 12mmol before eating food at a main meal time (not mid morning or mid afternoon), if you do a correction to get back to your ideal target of say 7mmol, you would need to subtract 7mmol away from 12mmol = 5mmol, so if 1u will lower you by 3mmol, you could give yourself a correction dose of 1.5u bolus and then then add that to your carb ratio dose and deliver the insulin in one injection.
Hope this helps you understand it all a bit better :wink:
