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On the pump and this happened

S

submarinerLV

Active Member
Messages
27
Ok, so I've been on the accu check combo coming up for a year now and last month I went on holiday to Tenerife.

As it was an early morning flight, I woke up at 3am with a level of 6.0 (great :)

After getting everything together and in the car, we took the 1 hour journey to luton airport, checked in and got some breakfast (this was just after 5am)

Just before I was about to eat breakfast, I did a level and to my shock horror, my level had gone up to 16.0!

I had not eaten or drank anything in the 2 hours from waking up to getting to the airport, but my level had gone from 6.0 to 16.0 (and my diabetes is very well controlled on the pump)

What could have possibly of happened?
 
Were you at all stressed? I know that stress (and excitement) can cause my daughter's readings to climb. Also the fact you had not eaten but were awake and active might have caused your liver to dump some glucose causing a spike in bg.
 
SophiaW said:
Were you at all stressed? I know that stress (and excitement) can cause my daughter's readings to climb. Also the fact you had not eaten but were awake and active might have caused your liver to dump some glucose causing a spike in bg.
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Well, I'm almost always stressed, but getting panicky and stressed often leads to me feeling the same so you could well be right, that's what caused it, but I do also think you make a very good point that my liver could have kicked out some glucose! What I've also noticed that if I go out on an evening and it's later in the evening my levels tend to be on the higher side then too, as opposed to when I'm at home and getting into bed around the same time each evening.

What do you think I should do for times like these and the unpredictable ones like travelling early in the morning? Stick on a higher Temporary Basal Rate?
 
Next time you're up early for travelling like that perhaps try having something to eat, even if it's small, when you first get up and bolus for it. If the spike was caused by your liver releasing some glucose then that might help to avoid it happening. For predictable higher readings on nights out you could set a temporary basal or create a new basal profile that you can switch to. Whenever I use a temporary basal for my daughter I do tend to check bg more often just incase it causes a hypo and also to make sure the temp basal is enough and she's not still running too high. It's so difficult to get the balance right, if only life was predictable and constant it would make it a little easier!
 
Omg - the exact same thing happened to me on my way back from Greece last Thursday. Left the airport with a BG of 8 and woke up in the car after an hour into my journey feeling odd - BG was over 16 and scarily had ketones of 1.6 !! Panic set in as we had another 1.5 hrs to travel. Got 2 big bottles of water to drink, did 3 boluses for the remainder of the journey and set my temp basal at 160% . When we arrived at my sister in laws my ketones had come down thankfully to 0.6 but BGs were still running high. It took a day and a half to get sugars back down. I like others think it was the lack of sleep with a 1am flight and stress on my body with the travelling.

The ketones did scare me though and my husband and i were ready to go to A&E on arrival. I think I did the right thing in dealing with the ketones but I am still confused as I thought they would only develop if I was unwell not just if I was a bit stressed or it was a liver dump. On saying that if it took a day and a half to get back to normal maybe I had picked up some kind of infection as well??
 
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