Thank you UPS

I had the pleasure of speaking with 2 small groups of employees at UPS here in Moncton today during my lunch hour. The purpose of the presentation was to give a personal perspective of what Type 1 is in conjunction with the JDRF Walk to Cure Type 1 Diabetes on June 7th. Thank you very much UPS for choosing JDRF as your charity of choice and thank you to each individual UPS employee who chooses to fundraise and participate in the walk. Your support is truly appreciated. Such initiatives will enable research to continue and bring us to a cure sooner. Like I said in a previous entry, we have huge plans for that day... I can already picture it in my mind, smell it, taste it and feel it. We're that close... For us, it will be the ultimate dream come true! I can't wait...

Adele's new insulin pump arrived early this week. There is nothing wrong with her old one, but the warranty ran out and our insurance company was willing to pay for a new one. Total price was $7200. Ouch! Thank god for our insurance! I have alot of reading up to do to fully understand all the functionality of the new system. The new pump came with a software package, wireless download capacity from pump to PC and also has Continuous Glucose Monitoring. A sensor inserted under the skin reads blood glucose every few minutes and the wireless transmitter sends this data to pump wirelessly. The pump displays a graph of the blood sugar for the past few hours. The pump does not automatically adjust insulin doses based on blood sugar though. A human intervention is still necessary to manage it all. How is this going to help us play the Type 1 game? It will save Adele finger pokes to check her blood sugar. It will also make it alot easier to check her sugar in public places or during various daily activities. We will also be able to set alarms that will go off if her sugar goes low or too high. We're quite excited! More posts will follow as we move forward with the new system... Stay tuned.

Adele's sugars have been on the good to highish side this week. Her sugars have started to shoot up during the night again though the last few days. Adjustments are necessary I think. I hate making changes in the night insulin doses because it means more testing and uneasy sleep since I am always quite unsure of how things are going to go the first few days after a dosage change. Monday night (Tuesday morning) her sugar went up to 17.3 @ 2:00 am. Last night (this morning) her sugar went up to 18.4 @ 1:15 am. I obviously needed to give her insulin to try and correct both times. 0.65 units of insulin last night brought her down to 9.6 before breakfast (still a bit high). After floating between 10 and 14 all afternoon (this is too high) and finding some blood in her infusion site (catheter that delivers insulin), we decided to change the infusion site even if it was only there for 2 days. The new infusion site brought her sugar down to 7.6 before her bedtime snack, so I think it was a good decision. I'm still not sure how things will go tonight. I haven't decided yet if or what changes I will make to her basal insulin doses throughout the night. I'll make a decision after seeing how stable her sugars are with the new infusion site...