Monday, September 04, 2006

More lows

Once again it has been a full week since my last post, and once again due to being busy, not really having time and energy left to sit down at the computer at night.

This last week my soccer team had 3 matches: Monday and Wednesday evening and Sunday afternoon. I played all three matches, only the one on Sunday full time, though.

Monday evening our opponent was the top team of our league, a team that will most likely be promoted to the Denmark’s series (3rd highest national league in women’s soccer in Denmark) by the end of this season. We meet them in the final match of the spring season, loosing that match 2-0, so we were top-motivated to take our revenge – and we did! We won 3-2 after having been behind twice in the match, so it was really a fight. I took part in the warm-up, but only played the second half. Still, the BG stayed in range (at least to my knowledge) as I was 8.0 (144) at the end – much better result than most of the other games I have played while being on the pump :-)

Wednesday’s match was against a lower ranging team, but we still managed to fall behind after only a few minutes play. Despite that we came back strongly and won 4-1! In this match I had a break of 20 minutes or so, and unfortunately had to fight the D a bit more. I started out at 5.1 (92), but during the first part of the first half I didn’t feel that fit, suspecting that the BG might be the culprit. I was replaced 35 minutes into the first half, and when I tested, I had a 3.1 (56) – no wonder my legs felt so heavy! I had reduced the basal to 65 % about an hour before the warm-up (I already run the lowest basal of the day in the hours from 3.30 to 6 PM, so doing a 35 % reduction gave me a basal similar to what I used in the first match – early afternoon – when I wore the Guardian sensor) and had it running like this for 1 h 30 min, but apparently that was not enough this time. I guess the fact that I already had the match of Monday plus all the ordinary exercise of my weekdays in the system may have played a role.

The nights following these two games all meant noctural hypoglycaemia to me. Annoying, but I guess that by time I will finally figure out how to tweak the basals overnight to avoid these lows. The sooner the better as I am not awakened by the lows myself. Jimmi is, or happens to wake up by some other cause, and notice how warm, sweaty and generally unresponsive I am. Thus he has to feed me some glucose tabs until he can wake me up or at least see that I respond to his actions.

The game yesterday was in the afternoon and I had hoped that this would help me avoid noctural hypoglycaemia. I did avoid it during sleep, waking up at 7.1 (128) this morning. Just before going to bed, however, I had a bad low. I was able to treat it myself, although I still wonder how the h… I was able to do that with a reading of “LO” (i.e., a BG below 1.1 (20))! The most scary thing about it was that it sort of came sneaking up on me. I was actually sitting at my computer preparing this post with the plan of posting it before going to bed. I was yarning a bit, but didn’t pay much attention to that as it was almost 10 PM and I had played a hard, full time match of soccer in the afternoon. Jimmi wanted me to check something out on the computer, which I all of a sudden had difficulties doing, and when he looked at me, he told me that he though I was low and I better go test. I was about to anyway, getting prepared for bed, but when I am that low I usually act very slowly. I remember testing at 10 PM, Jimmi standing beside me, immediately putting a piece of banana into my mouth, just to get me started on eating something. He offered me different treats, but I couldn’t really decide upon any of them, so I ended up continuing to eat banana, accompanied by some chocolate and a few crackers. When I finally started to fell a bit normal again, my eyes hit the time display of my old VCR recorder: 10.45! OMG! To me it felt like I had just used 10-15 minutes to eat while logging the result of the day on my BG sheet – I don’t know why the routine of doing something at a certain time of day/context never seems to be put off by the hypoglycaemic mind of mine!

As a side note, we lost Sunday’s game, unfortunately due to a ridiculous mistake by the referee, giving us a 2-1 defeat in stead of the tie that would have been fairer, given the possession of the ball and number of chances to score each team had. There was one happy note about the game for me, however: I played the full match, despite minor troubles with the BG cruising on the low side at the end of the first half/beginning of second half AND was awarded our team’s “Player of the match” title, entitling me to hold our team mascot until the next game :-) I can’t even remember what this hand-doll duck is called, but it is always with us, of course wearing a pink bow tie (because we are the pink army, of course).

Saturday was a bit sad on the other hand. I had to help my younger sister and her boyfriend move from their apartment here in Odense to their new one in Vejle, Jutland ;-( I will miss having her around the city!

That is all for now, folks!

1 comment:

Scott K. Johnson said...

Holy smokes! That was a scary number! Below 20! Wow.

Congrats on being awarded "Player of the match"! That's awesome!