The Final Descent

If you have or you have a child with diabetes then you probably know about the "Dawn Phenomenon" This is when the blood sugar has an unexplained rise in the morning due to the body releasing hormones around 4-5am. We do experience this on occasion but more commonly we have an opposite thing going on with J's blood sugar.

Around 3am every morning we start to see J's blood sugar make a VERY gradual fall, often causing him to be in danger of dropping low. Recently I have started to play with the Temp Basal setting on his pump to see if this would stop the drop and sure enough, it works like a charm! This allows me to test out the changes that need to be made to his basal rates. This gives us a little more peace of mind that we don't have to watch that number slowly and steadily drop for 3-4 hours and wondering if he is going to go low and if we should treat him ahead of time etc etc.

As you can see in the picture below, we were trucking along with a VERY steady blood sugar from 10pm until 2:18am.

 

 

 

Then this happens.............

 



You can clearly see when his blood sugar starts it's decline. Almost like a plane making it's final descent before landing at the airport. What causes this to happen? Does his body produce insulin during these hours? Does he have better insulin absorption during these hours? These are answers that I do not have, but what I do know is that his little body is up to something in the wee hours of the morning and as a result his body requires less insulin.

Today at about 3:30am I started out with a Temp Basal decrease of 20%. I watched and waited for about 90 minutes to see if that would stop the decline. It didn't level it out the way that I wanted, so I changed the Temp Basal to a decrease of 50% around 4:30am and as you can see he held pretty steady and actually started to have a little rise.

These pump settings are great tools to use. It is so much easier to test out dosages and learn how his body reacts without having to change the permanent settings every single time. This morning after we woke up and I consulted with my Diabetes Strong Co-Captain we decided to go ahead and make a change to his regular basal settings and see how his blood sugars react moving forward.

I hope that everyone has a wonderful Thursday and I would love to hear how you manage the body's many T1D mysteries!!

*this is in no way medical advice and you should always consult with your physician before making any changes to your medical regimen.