Bad Habits

I stink at logging. I was hoping the pump would solve this problem, allowing me to simply upload nad have beautiful logs to take to my endo. I was sorely disappointed when I saw that the CozManager does nothing like that, rather, I can get a list of everything happening. What the heck does that do for me? Nada.

I discovered the CoPilot, despite recalls preventing it from being used (for over a year- how long does it take to fix a bug?), I still used it. And it was...interesting. I finally got statistics, and that was fun. The insulin use charts showed me where I was doing a lot of corrections, but the log has crap all over it saying stuff like "imported from cozmanager" next to every bolus or bg level, making for a cluttered piece of mess. And the program decides if a bg was before or after a meal based on time of day. That's perfect if you eat at the same time everyday. I don't. That's why I pump. Why can't it figure out when you ate based on when the bolus was given, not time?

So I am back into an excel chart. I like it, I just need to keep up with it. Then hopefully I will have some good info to show my endo.

And I am realizing something- I have a lot of bad habits going on here.

My tests fall in no particular order. I seem to have gotten into a habit of just testing when I feel like it. This results in maybe 3 hours I tested every hour, then gaps of 5 hours without testing. Yeah, I get at least 6 tests in a day, but do they really tell me anything? I need to be testing before meals and two hours after if I really want to see how things are going.

Which brings my to my next bad habbit. I am a grazer. I eat what I want, when I feel like it. Yesterday I ate 196 grams of carbs for the day. Not bad. Except I didn't eat till 11, then ate around 11, 12, 1, and 2, about 20 grams each time. Then I didn't eat again till 7. Then I ate at 7, 8, and 10. Who the heck follows that kind of eating schedule? It can't be healthy. And the grazing results in a higher A1c according to Gary Scheiner in Think Like a Pancreas.

Allow me to break here to share something that annoys me with my pump, but yet I have no clue how it would be fixed. My bs is 77 right now. I'm cool with that. But I want to throw a load of clothes in and take a shower before I eat. I can do that, since I don't plan on dropping much lower. But it will be an hour before I eat likely. I enter my bg in my pump, so I know it's there and can upload it, see info in Copilot, and reference it when filling in my Excel sheet. But in an hour when I eat, I want my bolus reduced for that 77. I can enter the bg again when I bolus, but then that skews my testing averages. I guess I'd like the pump to offer the option to use the last taken bg as a correction (even if it was more than 10 minutes ago), or enter another bg then. What I do now is just cut about 10 grams of carb off the bolus to raise my bg a little.

So if I really want to see if my meal boluses are working, I need to both log, eat real meals, and test appropriately.

I like to think diabetes doesn't play a huge role in my life, and with pumping, it doesn't, but it does in this sense.