Lifting The Fog

Lift That Fog!

Yesterday morning as I took our sons to school, there was a heavy fog all about us.  These are some of the days that are pretty cool.  We sometimes pretend that we are in an airplane & that the fog is instead all of us going through the clouds & then visiting a while amongst the clouds.  Another great foggy day happened a little over a week ago.  Being still a kid at heart, I wanted to turn the foggy drive that our youngest son & I had ahead of ourselves into an adventure.  We were heading up to my hometown to visit our family for a special celebration.  As we began our drive, it came to me…yes, it would be great to get wee Alex as close to the windmills as possible.  In my mind, it was a bit like a scene out of a Stephen King kind of drive that day being so close to the moving windmills…surrounded by about 30 or so of them at a time.  Of course, I did not share the Stephen King analogy with Alex since he is only 5.  He got a charge out of the way we wound through small villages feeling like we were more on a movie set than anywhere near civilization. 

We can decide whether life is an adventure by driving in the fog & turning it into something “cool” as Al says. Living in a fog is another story don’t you think?  There is that oft said phrase, “my brain is in a fog.”  That sure can feel true with diabetes.  There are times that thinking straight takes more than Olympic brain strength.  Those are the times I find when I am either in low blood sugar or very high blood sugar.  Here’s the thing though…sometimes, the “fog” is literally invisible.

Fog being invisible describes the feeling that many folks with diabetes share with one another or at least say silently to oneself.  Those invisible fogs are the times when we believe that we are “right in range”…you know that magical 5-8 glucose monitor reading range…but we are not!

That foggy day yesterday morning was just one of those exact days!  I woke up & got up super early.  It was a wonderful feeling waking up to just the sound of the clock beating, a little wag of our goldie’s tail & gentle sleeping that was still happening with all the boys in our home.  I started simmering soup & planning out the day & had even more energy than usual.  As I reached for my glucose meter, I felt confident that I was going to see a beautiful reading of say 6.5 or something close to that.  Well, was I surprised to see the number 12 looking back at me.  The point is that you just cannot be sure by “feeling great” that your blood sugars are in healthy range.  Had I not tested my glucose, the invisible fog would have continued.  Instead, I continued to feel great however gave myself an insulin pump correction & got on with the day. 

As a little aside, I asked myself why in the world the reading was that high this morning & realized that “timing is everything”.  Yesterday afternoon I had made chocolate mousse & we all enjoyed that for dessert last night.  I had a delayed dessert though & enjoyed my treat at 8:00pm.  A better choice in hindsight to have that particular treat is after lunch on a weekend.  That treat always seems to result in delayed release of sugars so the insulin does not “hit” at the “right time” so it “hit” while I was sleeping & caused my glucose reading to increase overnight.  For me it is better looking forward to have the treat mid-day since then, I can correct the later increase in glucose during the day instead of having high sugars throughout the night & have to face that number on the meter in the morning.  That is why timing is everything. 

The fog can be fun ,yet for this gal, I prefer to use my glucose meter to avoid the “invisible fog” .

Smiles, Saundie J