dbw day 2 - one great thing

Today's prompt is: Tell us about just one diabetes thing you (or your loved one) does spectacularly!  Fasting blood sugar checks, oral meds sorted and ready, something always on hand to treat a low, or anything that you do for diabetes.  Nothing is too big or too small to celebrate doing well! 

So, my kid has this thing called "post-exercise delayed hypoglycemia", which is just a complicated way of saying her shit drops low overnight after a day of a lot of activity. It took us a while to figure this out. We expected her BG to drop during (and in the hours immediately after) exercising, but we didn't realize it could extend several hours after the fact, which typically means overnight. Awesome.

Once we realized this was an issue, we backed way off on how much insulin we gave her in the hours after a lot of exercise (soccer game, marathon trampoline session, etc). But that nearly always meant super high BGs overnight. Maneuvering her post-activity insulin needs is much more nuanced than we realized but recently, L has become a total diabadass at it.


She's been playing soccer since she was 4 years old and the first question she asked the doctors in the hospital after diagnosis was "will I still be able to play soccer?". A week and a half later she was back at practice, while I sat on the sidelines clutching an insulin pen and skittles to my chest like a life preserver. Here we are two and a half years later, and she has become so skilled at managing her BGs after intense exercise that she makes all her own food/insulin decisions now, with much greater success than John and I ever had. 

I've asked her how she is able to nail it almost every time, like is there some sort of mathematical equation I can utilize to help me figure it out? But no, there are too many variables, some of which come from just being in tune with her own body and just having a couple of years of experience under her belt, I guess.The best word I can think of to describe it is finesse. Finesse: skill in handing a difficult or highly sensitive situation; adroit and artful management.
  

My kid: nailing her post-exercise delayed hypoglycemia with finesse.