Monday, January 12, 2009

The Lowest Yet!

We had a rough morning yesterday! Kacey woke up at a 127. She's been waking up with some really great blood sugars and she's still had a great streak of daily blood sugars. When we went shopping on Saturday, Kacey has been asking for syrup. Syrup = every diabetics nightmare. Ugh! So I decided to take a look at some of the sugar free ones. I know those can be just as bad! But it's hard to eat waffles or pancakes plain. So there I stood in the aisle at Walmart scanning the labels of syrup with Kacey beside me grinning. Pancake & Waffle Syrup = 53g carbs (OMG!) Pancake & Waffle Light Syrup = 26g carbs (getting lower...but still OMG!) So then I spot Sugar Free Butter Flavor Low Calorie Syrup from Maple Grove Farms. Hmmm... made with Splenda...ohhhh then I spot where it says "supporter of Children with Diabetes" (cool!!)...turn it over 12g carbs! (wow! much better!) So as a parent, what do you do? Make your child eat plain pancakes or give in and bolus for the sugar free stuff? I gave in! I explained that because it was sugar free then it might not taste as good, but she'd adjust to the flavor. That brings us to breakfast yesterday. She wasn't very hungry and said she wanted waffles. Ok, 2 waffles, 30g carbs. Plus syrup, 12g carbs. Spray butter, 0g. Thats 42g carbs and I've got a smiling child. She loved the syrup! I tasted it and it wasn't bad at all. I could actually switch the whole family over to that stuff. This was at 9am. By 12pm, Kacey came in and said she was hungry. Well all she had was 2 waffles so since it was lunchtime, I told her to go test. The result....


This is been Kacey's lowest yet!! Umm, Kacey do you feel low? No. Do you feel shaky? No, I'm just hungry. I quickly got her something to bring her up. 15 min later, 88. Wow! By then she was getting fussy and wanted lunch. So she had lunch and tested 2 hours after that and she was an 81 (and falling). So her body decided to do something silly yesterday because then once we got to the JDRF Awards, she was running in the 200's! What scared me was she never felt the low! Thats really low for her and she wasn't having any symptoms!

4 comments:

Scott K. Johnson said...

Often one of my main symptoms is feeling hungry... That makes it hard when it's close to mealtime too, because I SHOULD be hungry then.

Anonymous said...

I use the sugar free syrup every day for breakfast (mmmm... blueberry waffles) and here's what I have found:

1) I end up using less syrup than the recommended serving size, so you might want to measure and see how much you're actually using.

2) The sugar free syrup is made up of sugar alcohols, which don't affect blood sugar as much as regular sugars. What I do is count half of the sugar alcohols.

For example: If all 12 of those grams are sugar alcohols, then only count 6. Plus, if you use less than the recommended serving size, you could end up with as few as 4g instead of the 12g you bolused for.

Anyway, YDMV, so just keep trying.

Jill said...

Yep Scott, I just thought because she didn't eat much for breakfast she was just hungry because it had been 3 hours (which is possible!) LOL!

Amalas~ Ahhhh thanks! I learned something new :) I did measure out the syrup and its 12g for 1/4 cup. It seemed that 1/4 cup was alot of syrup because it's not as thick as regular syrup. My first thought was wondering if she went low because she didn't eat all the syrup and when I checked the plate it was "licked" clean...lol! All 12g were Sorbitol so I should just count 1/2 of that and see what happens?

I do know she was one happy kid when she got that syrup ;)

Cara said...

That's the syrup I use. I used to just get the regular, but I hated "wasting" so many carbs. I like it a lot. :)
Lows like that are almost common for me (at least before the CGMS). I just lost the ability to feel them. But I am getting some of that back now that I am on CGMS. That's a good thing. :P