Little bursts of honeymoon

What's a honeymoon?

It's a little break from Diabetes. A type 1 can expect that at some point in their lives, their pancreas will magically kick back in for a period of time. Often it can follow an illness, ironically, much the same way that diabetes follows an illness. The "Honeymoon" as it's called, can last anywhere from a few hours to a few months, even a few years in rare cases. Imagine that, as a diabetic, you wake up one morning and your diabetes is in remission! No more shots, no more carb counting, no more 2am lows as you awake covered in sweat, disoriented looking for anything with sugar in it. Or that morning high blood sugar where you feel like you want to crawl out of your skin, the same skin that you have to plunge a syringe into to get control. A honeymoon is a little slice of happiness and confusion rolled into the same package.

Diabetes is a condition of routine. You eat what you eat because you've pre-planned what your sugar will do. You eat when you eat because that's what you've planned for with your insulin. Variations in any number of factors only leads to chaos and correction, which is why so many of the diabetics in the world are resistant to try newer, more advanced insulins, pumps, CGM's, etc. Change means uncertainty, uncertainty leads to stress, and stress leads to more uncertainty, all of which mess with your sugars and challenge your sense of control.

It would seem from all of the above that a honeymoon would be a romantic breakaway with any food you like, whenever you like, a full night's sleep (WOW), a untethered second helping of dessert maybe....hmm that does sound good. In reality however, for a caregiver of a diabetic at least, it's kind of like driving into the setting sun. It's gorgeous but you can't see a damn thing and you're not quite sure when it's going to end, just that it will. Every parent has this little flicker of hope during the honeymoon that maybe it's gone for good, but inevitably the highs come back and the glimpse of the cure fades.

Let me clarify that I don't mean to imply that honeymoons aren't great things. They are awesome for the diabetic I can assume. Come to think of it, maybe it's actually just hard on the caregiver as you're always looking on a map that you can't see. Maybe for the owner of the disease it's something you can feel?? I'd love to hear opinions on that foresure.

So, on Wednesday and Thursday we are on day 4 with a leg site on her, which only ever lasts until the 3rd day...and she's had 55 carbs of unbolused correction to handle sugar at or below 4.0mmol/L all day with a 30% cut of basal. It's stressful for us but such a nice little treat to see her system actually working. It shows that theres hope that one day we can hack into and crash the program that tells her islets to stay on the sidelines. I would LOVE to see them to come off the bench for a little longer.

8:30am 13.6mmol/L with 0.25 to correct, back to routine, thanks for the honeymoon.

b.