Learning our lessons

With my Mom visiting, we've been a bit out of our routine lately. Which is not such a huge deal, but last night it messed us up big time.

Usually at bedtime, Fred bathes Elise, while I get her snack and shot ready. But my Mom loves bath time with Elise, so Fred and I have sort of divvied up the other tasks. Last night we had the added confusion of a low (56) before her bath, so we were scrambling to get some carbs into Elise, then re-test, fix her snack and get the insulin ready.

To make a very long story short, Elise woke us up at 3:30 this morning. She was crying and asking for water, which is usually a sign of a low. I stayed in bed as Fred went to test her, but snapped wide awake when I heard him calling me frantically over the baby monitor.

"Joanne... get up! Where's the ketone monitor? She's 560!"

I don't think I have ever gotten out of bed so quickly. She was 1.8 on the ketone meter, and then it hit us... we had forgotten her bedtime NPH. We had given her 6g of carbs for the low, 15g of carbs for her snack, but no insulin for overnight. Talk about feeling like the worst parents in the world.

What should have tipped us off that there was a problem was the fact that she was 360 before we went to bed. But we have seen numbers like that before at night, and she wakes up fine the next morning. We should have checked her again, but we didn't.

After calling the after-hours number, we gave her the sliding scale. If I had sat and thought about it long enough, I wouldn't have needed to call, but this had never happened before, and I wanted to make sure we were doing the right thing.

She woke up high (356 ) and with ketones (1.8), but was normal at lunch and even low (55) when she woke up from her nap.

Fred and I had been feeling pretty good about things D-wise lately, but it seems when we get lulled into that false sense of security that diabetes rears it's ugly head and bites you in the bum.

A scary lesson, and I'm just glad it wasn't worse.