[RKDinOKC]

When you eat sugar your body makes insulin to keep it from raising your blood sugar too high. EVERYTHING you eat raises your blood sugar, it's how food works. Everything also takes a different amount of time to turn into blood sugar, and your body makes blood sugar from fat, etc. as well. And everyone one's system is different as to what food make how much sugar and for how long.

I have two insulns I inject. One is long term and manages what your body creates and the slower digesting foods. It is slow to have any effect and lasts a long time, 12 hours or more. However it can also cause low blood sugar problems. For example: if I skip a meal or during the night if i did not eat enough food that takes longer to digest. My blood sugar varies from 80 to 140 when I first wake up in the mornings. And sometimes I wake in the night very dizzy with cold sweats from low blood sugar and it is only 50. And sometime in the mornings my sugar is normal, but am sweety and know by sugar dropped during the night. That is why I am training Pepper to wake me when it gets to 70. (she is doing great btw, has woke me 8 times now, and I have no woken up sweaty).

The second is a short term insulin that lasts about two hours at the most. It is injected 10 to 15 minutes before you eat. How much you inject is dependent on how much you expect to eat. Too much and you go low, not enough and your blood sugar goes high. This is necessary to keep sugsrs down right after meals because the long acting doesn't lower eating spikes. The side effect of the short term insulin is it converts the sugar to fat. I gained a LOT of weight before they added a pill taken daily that helps to keep the short term insulin from making fat. Is sucks that my doctor did not add this until I gained 75 lbs. Have lost 15lbs.

When first started shooting up tracked my intake of food and insulins and used a LOT of blood test strips to see what happened to my blood sugars. I did this so I could better gauge not only the amounts if what I had to eat to counteract the long term insulin, but also the amount of short term insulin to take before eating and how much of what I could eat.

For example when I visited my friends in Austin they did not eat on any sort of schedule. I kept a coke in the fridge and candy so I could keep my blood sugar from dropping when they ate much later than my normal times. Did not want to eat anything that effected my blood sugar longer because they might decide to go out and eat someplace and I wanted to be able to go eat without taking a whole lot short term insulin to keep my sugar down.

As far as eating sugars, I have done very well. My A1C measurements have been between 6.3 and 6.5. Normal is 5.7. but anything under 8 is considered under control.

Talking to my doctor about my complications he tells me they are NOT normal for a diabetic with my A1C level and that I should be doing well. Especially since I have no liver or kidney problems. Says my complications have to do with blood vessels/nerves and he thinks are related to that MRSA infection in my blood from that nail.