More tales of the Road Warrior

Five in the morning is a foul time of day. I do not, do not, do not like getting up before the sun can be bothered to.

But with literally hundreds of miles to go before I rest, that was what was required of me. Once again, and all too often lately, I was off to Albuquerque. This time for an early morning meeting of a group I’m part of that writes little single sheet mini-lessons for docs about various diabetes subjects; followed by a teaching gig at the University. I could, in theory, have done both of them remotely, but I figured, what the hell, if I’m going to be on the phone for half the day anyway, I might as well be there in person.

However, given my adventure the last time I headed south, I decided my new protocol would be to always take the Sentry with me on any drive that was more than an hour long.

The Jeep designers were thoughtful enough to design my ride with a nice little Sentry-sized recess in the top middle of the dashboard.

The first half of the day was un-eventful. Well, that’s not quite true. My turn signal freaked out, clicking with that ultra-vast clickiety-clickiety-clickiety-click noise that tells you you’ve lost a bulb. Between diabetes duties I swung into a Pep Boys to buy a replacement bulb. Then I had to buy a screw driver to change the bulb. Then it still didn’t work. Then I discovered that a mouse had chewed through the wring between the bulb and wherever in the car that power comes from….what? The engine?

So there was some stress involved.

And it wasn’t one of those wires you can splice yourself. It was one of those complicated coaxial cable kinda wires. Crap. This is gonna hurt my wallet. When I finished at the University I dashed north again for the Jeep dealership in Santa Fe.

$135.23 later, my tail light and turn signal were working again. Cheaper than the ticket I would have gotten ignoring it, I suppose.

Anyway, I was shooting correction boluses at the stress high all afternoon. And they caught up with me on the last leg home after leaving the Jeep Boys.

First, I got the “low predicted” alarm. I suspended my basal and popped a glucose tab in my mouth (Tropical Fruit Flavor!), then watched and waited. The next two updates on the Sentry monitor showed the drop continuing. So I popped another tab as I zipped down the highway.

Eventually, I could see the trace line flatten out. As it began to rise again, I turned the basal back on.

Could I do that with my pump perched on top of my steering wheel? Yeah. Probably. But I really like the larger screen. It’s easier to see the shape of the trace, and the fine details of slope and plateau which I use to guide my decision making process. More glucose? Wait another five minutes? Time to restart the insulin?

Plus, it lets me keep both hands on the wheel while driving my diabetes.