Debugging the Highs: Update

Well, I went through my debugging sequence as I described in a previous blog entry and the news is not good.

I am responding completely differently to R insulin than I was just three months ago, which is the the last time I was not taking Metformin.

My response to the R insulin was so different from what it was 90 days ago, that I went so far as to drive to a Wal-mart pharmacy in a different state and buy a new vial of R there, just to make sure that the two week old-vial I was using didn't have something wrong with it. The previous vial I'd bought at my usual pharmacy was the same lot as the insulin I'd bought a couple months before and I wondered if perhaps it had weakened.

To test the potency of the new insulin, I ate the identical meal for dinner using the same dose of the new insulin as I had eaten the night before with the dose from the older vial. I ended up with a blood sugar reading only 5 mg/dl different at one hour from what I'd seen the previous night. Unfortunately, that reading was 178. And that was with 4 units of insulin, which is a lot for me. This was using a 1/12 insulin/carb ratio which was what I would have used before when not taking Metformin.

Yesterday tried using a 1/8 insulin ratio, and it worked okay at lunch with 25 grams of carbs, though not great. But when I tried it at dinner with 40. I ended up at 157 at 1 hour and 126 at two.

That doesn't sound too bad, but there's a hitch: Eventually the insulin IS kicking in and I'm going low. After my meals yesterday I ended up in the low 80s feeling shivery--and after eating more fast acting carbs I was still in the 80s an hour later.

This sounds like what happens when a person has developed antibodies to insulin. The insulin is bound by the antibodies for a while making it less effective, then the antibodies release it and it kicks in later.

If that is my problem, the only thing I can do is wait it out and hope it goes away. Needless to say, I'm going to have to cut way back on carbs because I am going too high after meals, staying high and then getting lows, which make me feel like crap all day long.

If any of you have had anything like this occur, let me hear about it.