From Fever to Half Marathon - Type 1 Diabetes Edition
I will keep it short this week: I can literally count on one hand the number of times I got a fever in the past 20 years, but the universe has its own funky ways of playing with us little humans on this planet, and since it doesn’t care much that The Curious Diabetic is running his first official race on Sunday, he decides to send him a good strong fever right a couple of days before the big day.
The Curious Diabetic feels the hit and with extremely low energies starts to observe what sort of impact such a strong inflammation has on all type-1 diabetes biomarkers such as carb to insulin ratio, amounts of units injected, average blood glucose and glucose variability. He has very little energy and he doesn’t log anything (ALWAYS log everything), so he’s basically a victim of the events. Not good, but that’s life.
Diabetes and Fever: Observations
He has observed the following things:
Regardless of how little and moderately he ate, his blood glucose would spike to the ceiling and above. He ate a modest vegetable soup on the evening, and woke up with a blood glucose over 400.
Despite eating a fraction of the usual calories and amounts, his insulin requirements were absolutely out of control. No amount seemed to be just enough, and there was always a couple of extra units to inject to tame the absurd spikes.
All those extra units ended up stacking on each others, causing glucose to crash down and to bounce back up right after.
I did my best, it just refused to come down.
Diabetes and Fever: Observations
And he has also learned a couple of useful things:
High fever, or any other major inflammation in the body, will inevitably cause unmanageable spikes. The levels of cortisol are abnormally high, and this has a cascade effect on blood glucose and insulin resistance. Tough to accept, but sometimes one can just sit, distress and patiently let the storm pass.
As a consequence of the high blood glucose, there’s a logical tendency to inject more. It makes sense to an extent, but not when having multiple injections too close to one another. That will cause violent crashes and bring the risk of severe lows. The Curious Diabetic was not very lucid, and he injected too much, and went from super-high highs (around 350-400) to lows (around 70) way too rapidly. Thinking clearly with a fever is not easy, but he should still do his best.
Sleeping is even more essential. Sleep with diabetes is simply critical for your average type-1 diabetes day in the life. With fever you simply have no excuses but to make sleep your religion. He averaged an amazing 11 hours of slumber during the fever days, and each day marked a little improvement. And he got out of it.
A failed attempt to bring it down, in the middle of the fever valley.
Powered by sleep, endless liters of water and a few veg soups, this rollercoaster week ended like this:
At the finish line, full of energy. High blood sugar was a secondary problem today.
