Independence - 24 hour update

Well, the first 24 hours of Dylan's trip to Outdoor School have been relatively uneventful. They arrived at the 200 acre site around 10:30am yesterday morning, and quickly met their counsellors and claimed their bunks, before jumping head first into a full afternoon of activities. As mentioned in yesterday's post, One Small Step for Dylan, One Giant Leap for Mom, Outdoor School is a high activity week involving a lot of exercise and outdoor learning. Exciting, but rough on the blood sugar.

A lunch time test indicated a 4.2 mmol/l (75.6mg/dl) blood glucose level. At afternoon snack he was 4.1 mmol/l (73.8 mg/dl) and at dinner he was down to 3.3 mmol/l (59.4 mg/dl). All 3 numbers are too low for my liking, so I was very worried when I spoke to Dylan at 7:15pm last night.

Dylan has had nighttime hypoglycemic seizures in the past. He hasn't had one in a few years now, but all of the ones in the past were after days in which his sugar levels ran low for at least a few hours of the day. I didn't want to risk him having a seizure (or worse, an undetected low) in a cabin with his friends, not to mention without me there to treat it, so together we decided we would err on the side of caution and program a temp basal overnight. 12 hours at 75% was the final decision, in part because that's what he did at diabetes camp the past 3 years. We also agreed that if his bedtime snack reading was under 5.0 mmol/l (90 mg/dl) he would call me again. As a final precaution, I told him to test one last time right before going to bed and if the reading was under 8.0 mmol/l (144mg/dl), he was to have a juice box.

Though my experience with diabetes was telling me these precautions should be enough, I was still frantic most of the night and barely slept. I finally dozen off around 1:30am, with both the house phone and my cell phone right beside me. I woke up frequently through the night, but never due to a ringing telephone. At 7:30am when my alarm went off, I was happy to discover that there had been no calls, and therefore no problems.

Only 3 more nights to go...