Keeping up with the Glucose

Deanelle Thompson
Jan 20, 2025
3 min read

Tales of a Dramatic CGM

Oh The Drama GIF by MOODMAN

Morning Drama

Some mornings I wake up and feel like the king of the world ready to conquer the day. I take a swig of water, check my CGM and boom, I am coasting at 110 and have been there for a few hours. I am doing back flips internally and doing my celebratory dance basking in my morning glory, as if I just won gold at the olympics.

Then one pivotal event happens. I hop into my car and zoom off to work and my sugars start to climb. Starting from 110 to 120 then magically up 160 or higher from all of the stressed induced travel to my corporate daycare.

With my blood sugar soaring high or getting there, I step into work with Harold, the glucose diva in tow, showing up uninvited, loud, disruptive, and with no care about my daily schedule.

All the while, I am quietly muttering at my dexcom, “ Can you not?” letting loose a few quiet expletives in between.

But, Harold doesn’t care. I sit at 200, as I continue to climb.

Lunchtime Plot Twist

Later, I try to redeem the day with a well balanced lunch, some quinoa, chicken, broccoli and a salad on the side. But, surprise! The salad dressing has a secret identity.

The salad dressing pokes fun at me, “ You thought this dressing was free.” But we’re actually glucose grenades.”

Suddenly, I am 240, climbing higher and feeling the knots and turns in my stomach and smelling the acetone taste of my breath.

Now, my pump sighs, while all my alarms continue to blare. “ I told you to pre-bolus.”

Source: http://www.heat.com/

Afternoon Crash( Let’s get low low low)

After the morning shenanigans, Harold decides to take his leave and then in comes his replacement, Famished Fred, as my Dexcom reads 68.

I am at home now, raiding the kitchen. Eating anything and everything that can soothe my hunger, anything that can ease the storm of panic and hunger that’s pounding me.

So, I eat. I eat one smartie, then another, then some chips, maybe some grapes.

40 minutes later, Harold is back. Climbing up, going the distance and I am magically back up to 200 again as Harold smiles back at me, chuckling to the tune of my Dexcom.

Evening Cliffhanger

Lying down now, I take a correction as my blood sugar climbs. My CGM graph looks like an outline of the Himalayas. I laugh, cry a little too, but do my best to think about the bright side.

I survived! Tomorrow is a new day. My diabetes may not have its act together today, but hey, I have another opportunity tomorrow.

Blood Sugar Takeaways

Living with diabetes can sometimes feel like starring in a never-ending drama. Just when your blood sugar is cruising along smoothly and you feel like you’ve taken control of the captain’s wheel, steering your ship in the right direction- BAM- an unexpected reading throws you overboard without warning.

Thankfully, in today’s world, we have tools that help us spot when and how glucose excursions happen – and our CGM is one of the most powerful. The trick is figuring out how to actually make sense of all the data it throws at us.

Here are a few ways that we can optimize our health with our data:

Know our patterns. There are 42 factors that affect our blood glucose with some of those factors being: stress, illness, carbs, too little sleep, etc.
Spot the trends, take notes and ask the right questions. If you have a high or low blood sugar reflect on what happened and either use a notebook or if you are using a cgm, log it in the app. Reverse engineer your low or high and figure out what you can do to prevent the ones that you can.
Know that not everyday will be perfect… and that perfectism is not to be expected. Every day will be different and sometimes the best that you can do is to manage your ups and downs with grace and maybe some good snacks too.