I’ve been really depressed the last couple of afternoons. Yesterday, I chalked this up as just overall blues, though I remember thinking it was incredibly strange that my sugar number after working out for over an hour was at 219. Where had that number come from? It meant I’d been riding a lot higher than that before exercise, but my pre-lunch number had been normal.
I’d been having some trouble with my insulin pen. I’d dial in a test unit and depress the plunger in the open air to make sure the syringe was clear (I usually do this before each dose now to make sure there’s no blockage. I’ve had too many underdosage issues because of this), and not having any insulin come out after one, two, five dials. Once I had to dial in ten units of insulin and spray it out just to get it clear. I changed out my needles a couple of times, thinking somehow the insulin had gotten gummed up or something (anything’s possible).
Today, growling through my “I want to poke out my eyes with spoons” and “maybe I should just kill myself” depression-induced litany, I went to Chipotle to use my birthday gift certificate and tested, once again, at 219.
Even without working out (depression has a habit of stealing motivation, which is why diabetics probably have to have their sugar under control before starting any kind of new routine or mental enterprise, which is sort of a catch 22, cause working out also helps your sugar, but depression caused by ass-unhappy sugar saps your energy in a big way), I should have only been at about 150, 170 tops.
So I dialed in my 6 unit bolus and plugged it in, and when I depressed the end of the pen, it just felt… weird. I wasn’t getting any resistance, the way you’d get when you’re injecting, you know, fluid into fat.
Then I went to dial in the 10 units of basal for the 219 number… and that’s when I took a good look at the clear tubing of the pen plunger mechanism.
There’s a screw-like piece of plastic that should be flush against the plunger that depresses it evenly when you dial it in. But in this pen, the plastic plunger had somehow gotten skewed at a nearly 90 degree angle, so when I depressed the plunger, I was getting a very low pressure “squirt” response from the insulin in the pen.
Meaning I wasn’t getting even close to my full dose of insulin.
Dammit, man.
I came home and threw out the old pen and started up a new one. Easy fix, you know, but… I hate, hate HATE sugar-induced depression (granted, it wouldn’t have been as bad if I wasn’t low already, but I can do a better job fighting it off when I can think clearly).
Spending my afternoons wanted to tear people’s heads off and claw out my eyes and weeping into my cornflakes just fucking kills me. It took a lot of effort to bleed through that last night, and now I get to set my 1am sugar-testing alarm, because I have no idea how much of that dinner insulin actually got injected into my system (I just tested at 298. I should be closer to 180 2 hours after dinner. Took a four unit correction, will test again at 1am).
It’s shit like this that makes diabetes annoying. I’m really fucking thankful that I have some degree of control over my moods and of how hard this thing hits me, but leveling out, staying there, living the best you can with this fucking disorder, is a lot of hard fucking work.
Too many spoons. Too much mental energy, some days. Not just to keep it in my head, but to keep my head actually processing things optimally.
Keep on truckin’.
