Tuesday, October 12, 2010

A1C Going Up...

SOOO FRUSTRATING!!! Yesterday Alyssa had her 3 month checkup with our endocrinologist. Her A1C went up, AGAIN. From 8.3 to 8.9.

It's maddening. As a mother of a Diabetic child, you check and you bolus and you check and you bolus trying and trying to achieve that goal of a 120 blood glucose. But sometimes you can do everything absolutely right and Diabetes still throws you a curve ball.

We're trying to make adjustments to basal rates (the insulin her pump automatically gives her once an hour) to see if that could help control her blood sugars... and also a higher insulin to carb ratio. Now when she eats breakfast she gets 1 unit of insulin per every 25 carbs she eats. For lunch she gets 1 unit for every 40 carbs. And the rest of the day, 1 unit for every 50 carbs. Amazing how different it is from morning to night!

When kids are growing, they give off a growth hormone which fights with the insulin creating a lot of kids (mine included) to be insulin resistant in the morning.

So what we're going to do so we can see what Alyssa's blood sugars are doing ALL the time (instead of only the "snapshot" we get when we test her blood glucose) she's going to be hooked up to a Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM) for 5 days and then we will take it off and the doctors will plug it into the computer and see what comes up! This way we can take a look at her blood sugars and what they are consistently.

We aren't going to get a CGM for her to wear permanently:
A.) The doctor thinks it's a better idea for her to wear something like that when she knows how to care for her diabetes more independently.
B.) It's very expensive and it's not covered by our insurance. (Don't you love health care?)
C.) I don't want my daughter to be hooked up to anymore things right now. The CGM requires another catheter in her body. And another thing she has to wear constantly on her body like her insulin pump.

So we go tomorrow afternoon to get the CGM hooked up and in 2 weeks we'll have a follow up. Here we go!

2 comments:

  1. Tell Lissy I'll be praying for her as she's hooked up to the CGM. I hope it gives the doctors the insight they need for her treatments.

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  2. My daughter did a CGM for a 5-day period too & it went well. Nifty little thing. One possibility of her A1C increase cold be the new start of schoolyear w/ excitement, nerves, and a host of other kids carrying who knows what germs. My daughter consistently gets higher at the beginning of a new schoolyear.

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