5th sensor a lifesaver

Jenny says:
Our medtronic rep. came to Tommy's school again on Wednesday to help us insert another sensor, his fifth sensor to be exact. She had me insert one into her using the sens-serter, and then Tommy did his using the sens-serter. In his stomach of course! (I have to figure out a way to try some different body parts.) Tommy said that it hurt a little, but I never heard anything more about discomfort.

Tommy threw up at 12:00 on Thursday night. His blood sugar was about 100 when he did, so I was worried about a low. So, I thought I would try to prevent it by reducng his basals by 50% for the next 3 hours. We checked his ketones with the blood ketone meter which said 0.00. (This was our first sick day since diagnosis last April.) I checked the Guardian many times and saw that he was staying pretty steady at 100. Then he threw up at 4:00 am. And he was going down, so I took his pump off and I checked him 2-3 times every hour until 7:00 a.m. He threw up at 7:00. Then fell asleep until 10:00. I put the pump back on at 10:00. The Guardian said that his blood sugar was about 110.

I called our CDE and she said, "What! You can't reduce the insulin during a sick day! You need to start pushing carbs. And giving lots of insulin. He probably has ketones!"

Sure enough, we checked and he had large ketones. Ketones scare the heck out of me. He has never had them before, and I know how scary they can get. So, Tommy started drinking soda with a spoon. A few hours after that, he said that he could probably keep down a pull-in-peel or swedish fish. So off to the store I went. He was getting way more insulin than he has ever gotten. It was so nice to see that his blood sugar was not going crazy with this aggressive treatment.

Tommy finally got very interested in his numbers. I think that he was a little worried, too. I saw him looking at it frequently. I looked at it every 20 minutes. He said to me "Aren't I lucky that I had this thing on!" I think that we would have probably checked his blood sugar more than 30 times that day. And worried a lot more. His ketones went away by the evening.

Last night, I was operating on very little sleep, and he was running a little high from the candy and soda. So, I changed the high threshold to alarm at 270, a little higher than we like to run it. It alarmed a few times in the night so it woke me up and gave me the chance to give more insulin.

Tommy and I are pretty happy with this device today!