Snapshot

Last night, I rather smugly put this picture up on my Instagram:

‘Look at me,’ the picture screams. ‘I am winning at diabetes!’

And then, this morning, after eight hours of uninterrupted sleep, this was how my pump screen looked:

W.I.N.N.I.N.G.

So, riddle me this, why did I wake – after eight hours of uninterrupted sleep – feeling so completely and utterly exhausted? I wasn’t up overnight to go to the loo or let the dog out or deal with a low blood sugar. I just slept. Peacefully.

There was no explanation.

Until I looked at this:

And this:

And this:

And then it all made sense. Except it didn’t. How had that happened? Had I sleep-walked into the kitchen, sleep-baked a pavlova and sleep-eaten it? Had I reached over in my sleep and eaten some of the jelly snakes on my bedside table?

The answer is no. All I had done in those eight hours was sleep.

Without my CGM on, I would have had that pre-bed BGL and the morning BGL as the only pieces of information. And it would have looked damn pretty. I would have spent all day thinking about how lovely and pretty and stable by BGLs had been overnight.

But with my CGM on, I know a lot more.

Which is great, except I’m not sure that I want to know. Because now I feel like I have to do something about it and quite frankly, I am still not in the headspace to be analysing glucose levels and making basal changes and being all diabetes-smart.

My CGM is on this week as a security measure. I really didn’t feel like putting it in, but I knew that I needed to. I am counting down until I can rip it out on Friday morning, which is a far cry from trying to get as many days as possible out of each sensor as a cost-saving measure.

I now know why I am not feeling particularly rested, but I feel even less rested with all this information at hand. THIS is when data is paralyising – when we just don’t have the ability – for whatever reason – to do anything with it and all it does is overwhelm us. Ever more.