Unleashing the stoopid...

It never fails to amaze me that despite having overall normal diabetes control I still have days when all my diabetes know-how goes out of the window and I make decisions which would realistically be out-smarted by a sock with 3 brain cells.  By 'normal' I of course mean a fair amount of steady days, with the odd bat-crap crazy one the next.

Overall, I maintain an HbA1c of around 7% and don't know any of the staff at Accident and Emergency by name, so I consider myself to be negotiating this sometimes wonky path with reasonable success.  It is usually (and reliably) the times when I am under a touch of stress that I lose my ability to function as a reasonably sensible PWD with the ability to make choices.  Clever ones, anyway.

Today was my driving test at work.  Not the first ever one; I passed that 11 years ago.  This one was compulsory with the new job I have been looking forward to starting so very much.  All I needed was a good blood glucose (BG) to work on so that I didn't either a) have a hypo before the test and not be able to take it (hypos mean no driving for 45 minutes under DVLA rules) or b) having a hypo during the test, which would be embarrassing and again, mean no driving for another 45 minutes.  That's all I needed to do.

I was running between 6.5 and 7 mmol all morning from 7am when I woke until 12.30 when I arrived at the test center.  For me, that's a pretty sexy day and exactly the kind of BGs I needed to make this test a go-go, rather than a no-go.  As I arrived, I felt the pangs of hunger creeping in.  Mistaking these for pangs of a familiar slow-moving low BG, and panicking that a hypo could ruin this chance to take the test - an important landmark in my new career - I glugged down half a bottle of juice, 20g of pure fruit sugar.

I was 13.4 and feeling less than jolly by the time my test came around.  Had I been watching in from the outside I could have told you it would happen; I would have giving myself a gentle kick in the leg to stop myself drinking anymore.  A sip, maybe, to ward off any stealthy hypo.  But half a bottle?

Seriously.  Dumb.

What would almost undoubtedly have remained a 5-6mmol (if anything, going up slightly with the adrenaline), was battered for a BG more than double by the time I had finished unleashing the 'stoopid' on myself.

But hey, I passed the test and lived to tell the tale.  Maybe now and then it's OK to unleash the stoopid, if you can spot it when you do it.

Do you do this kinda stuff, too?  You know, the stoopid kind?