The spreadsheet

Since I managed to conquer doing Scruffy's spreadsheet for the last four months that he was on insulin + his OTJ tests (even though it never did really demonstrate what I wanted it to - all that work for not-so-much reward!), I figured that I might as well do the entire year he was on Levemir. Always a glutton for punishment, obviously. It's been pretty upsetting, so far, and I've only done two or three more months.

Despite the reading that I did, I clearly missed the point of working with Lev. I READ the Tilly protocol, I truly did, several times. I was too intimidated to try the Insulin Support Group on FDMB. (Not even sure it was in operation when we started on Lev.) But apparently, nothing sank in. I just finished recording the April, 2007, numbers, and I can see that I was still operating on a PZI/TR sort of mode, just using a different insulin. One which didn't work quite right with that kind of usage. There are brief glimpses of the potential that Lev has every now and then in April, but for the most part, I totally missed the point of using it. There are places where I actually noticed that Scruffy was having a good day or two and then a bad day - a pattern that continued right up until I finally managed, with Jojo's help, to get the dosage right months later; the trouble was, I never caught on that I was CAUSING that pattern, changing doses every couple days or even more frequently. Like you could do with PZI, no sweat. And even though I did my little "experiment" - one shot of R the first week, that had wonderful results - I was convinced that I didn't want to use R, that the Lev and Scruffy and I would all do our jobs and it wouldn't be necessary to use a booster of any kind. I have no explanation for that idiotic determination; I just had it in my head that this would work the way it was supposed to. Period. So there are TWO reasons why it took so long to catch onto how Levemir works. (Or, in this case, DIDN'T work.) On the other hand, there were those times when there were stunningly gorgeous numbers - that I'd certainly never seen on PZI - and that was enough incentive to keep me going, despite the rough patches. (At one point, I proudly showed my graph of one month of Scruffy's numbers to someone, and she said, "Well, yeah, but look how it zigzags up and down and up and down here. Do you WANT it to do that?") The sad thing was, I was so thrilled with the LOW numbers - the ones that were under the 300's that I'd been used to for so long - that I just kind of ignored the HIGH ones. In my defense, if there is a defense for excessive stupidity, given the fact that eventually - and despite me - Scruffy no longer needed insulin, I gave him an extended time for his pancreas to heal. (Is that a defense? Well, it's an excuse, anyway.)

Aside from the fact that I've got a ton of work left if I'm going to finish the spreadsheet- because I seem to have disposed of the actual logbook pages by accident, so I have to transfer everything from the blog to a notebook and then to the spreadsheet - it's embarrassing to think that anyone might look at the spreadsheet and know immediately that I had NO idea what I was doing. On the other hand, if the truth hurts, so be it, I guess.