There is a very good reason the insulin pump comes with a low reservoir warning alarm; we need insulin. It's kind of the point of an insulin pump. Without it, us pancreatically defective people have a time limit, and a pretty short one at that. The low-reservoir alarm is our lifeline to making sure the pump is never out of insulin. But when your pump is alarming for hours upon hours and - like me - you don't want to change the reservoir early wasting what insulin is left, you can lose track of the dwindling units.
Last night I managed to go to bed without having stocked up on insulin (I blame the wine) and must have run out somewhere between 8mmol (11pm) and 17mmol (4.45am). So my super-sleuth skills tell me, anyway.
In my fuzzy haze of high BGs I managed to change the reservoir, find a comfy spot in the bed again and return to the land of nod.
But today my slightly unconventional method of basal-testing (checking your background insulin dose is correct) has revealed that I have in fact been having a series of overnight hypos. How do I know this? For the last couple of weeks I have been having sugars of 15/16mmol during the day with no explanation of why. I had put it down to my body not agreeing with the oh-so luxurious lunch of Ryvita and Cottage Cheese (hell on a plate) I have been adopting as a low-carb higher-protein lunch, but today I have barely strayed from 6mmol. The only difference, tellingly, is the guaranteed lack of hypo.
I wouldn't suggest that attempting to go it alone without insulin (which works out less than unsuccessfully the rest of the time) is the way to carry out some decent hypo-testing, but in a backward and very unconventional way it has sorted out my little predicament.
It has also proven that I am most definitely and unequivocally, still a diabetic :)
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