D Blog 7 and the insulin overdose

Phew, blog week has been pretty demanding so I'm looking forward to getting back to my style of posts!

Now I'm meant to link the blogs I've stumbled across thanks to diabetes blog week, and they're pretty amazing!
1) k2 at http://diabetesaliciousness.blogspot.com
She's brilliant, there aren't any other words for how amazing her sense of humour is. As always reading her posts has made me smile.
2) Meri at ourdiabeticlife.com is inspirational and gives me a bit of a look into what it must be like to be a mum of a diabetic. 

Now that this blog week is over, I thought I'd share todays diabetes drama!

RD presents: that time I accidentally OD'd on insulin
... so this happened last night!

So it was 10.30 and time for my blood sugar check. I'd been the perfect student, totally prepared for todays exams and heading to bed early. But no, I made one mistake. Typing my blood sugar into my insulin pump, I sat with bleary, glazed eyes attempting to dial down the amount of insulin the pump wanted to give me. 

But then I pressed the button one too many times, giving the max amount of insulin to myself- 6 units. Now for me, one unit drops my level by 6 and one unit covers approx. 20 grams of carbs. So this amount of insulin (had it gone in) would've dropped my level by 36 mmol/L requiring 120 g of carbs to keep it stable. Doing the math, we're talking negative blood sugar here considering I don't have full size pizzas on standby to give me that amount of carbs. Negative blood sugar=death.

So I hastily detached the pump, insulin dripping everywhere (did I mention how bad that stuff smells?) and sobbing because I had no idea how to make it stop. This sobbing was then followed by downing lollies, nesquik and apple juice in quick succession for fear that I'd had too much insulin. So thanks to the panic attack and mass amount of food I didn't sleep all that well and was finally woken up at 3am in the cold, to test my levels again. Lovely and perfect blood sugars.
So I didn't really sleep much and I had an exam this morning counting towards my HSC, thing is I couldn't remember half of what I'd studied thanks to the mass panic and tiredness.

So there you have it, you can do everything right and then one little click of the pump and there goes a restful night. *facepalm*

Comments

  1. Ashleigh20 May 2013 at 16:52

    How scary!! I did the same thing the other day...I accidentally pushed through 40 units of insulin (2 days total worth of insulin for me) and having to eat 400gm of carbs (felt so sick afterwards). I nearly didn't realise Id done it either...I honestly thought I was a goner. Heres to hoping you never have a scare like that again!

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  2. Bec20 May 2013 at 17:06

    Gosh, likewise!! How scary, I'm so lucky my pump is set to a max bolus of 6 units. That would've been some serious effort to get to 400 grams. At least I'm not the only one that does these things :)Should probably learn how to make a bolus stop though...

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