At last!

What I've been trying to figure out how to show here - the drastic change in Scruffy's numbers at the point where Jojo said she thought he was rebounding on 1.25u BID, and the subsequent insulin activity/numbers from then until he no longer needed insulin. The "rebound test" began on February 18, 2008. I lowered his dose to .75u BID of Levemir, and gave R with each shot, depending on the preshot - around 200 and over, he got .5u R; under that .25uR. This continued until 2/27/08, when I dropped the R. About 3/10/08, I lowered the dose again to .5u of Levemir BID - no R. By the last week of March, he was getting .25u, mostly BID. Between April 6 and April 8, he went 59.5 hours without insulin. (He had a 165 and then a 154 and I panicked and gave him a "shot" - on the "0" marker of the syringe.) I gave him another 0+ shot in the morning of April 9, and that was his last shot, I can only hope FOREVER.

This is the printout from my OneTouch Ultrasmart meter that shows very clearly the amazing results of using the right dosage. The pinkish band is what the One Touch insisted is the "desirable glucose level range" - for humans, I guess - of 90-140. One other interesting fact - the two spikes in glucose level, on March 14 and March 28, were both reflections of a dosage change. On the 14th, he had an extended duration of 24 hours from his previous shot, and on the 28th, I lowered him to .25u. Amazing - if ONLY I'd realized that Lev was going to be so consistent with that reaction to changing the dosage months before.....



As his spreadsheet shows, once he was off insulin, he had quite a few numbers that seemed to be higher than might be desirable, but he brought himself back down to good numbers easily. He free feeds, so unless there was some reason I wanted to see if food would lower him, he made his own judgments on when he needed to eat. I will freely admit that I had a really hard time adjusting to the fact that his numbers OTJ were not nearly as nice as they had been with Levemir, although spot checks now are usually between the 60's and the 80's.

I don't know why I feel such a sense of relief finally getting this chart posted. It's been making me crazy for months now that I couldn't show the miraculous - well, it WAS miraculous! - difference Levemir was able to make once we removed the things I was doing that caused all that rebound and gave low, steady, appropriate doses. I still think that Scruffy is a prime example of a fortuituous combination of a great insulin, a perceptive advice-giver, a persistent although basically clueless caretaker, and a whole bunch of good luck. And I guess there's nothing wrong with any of that, right?