Raven is our rock star night alerting dog. On most nights she wakes me up at least once to alert to an out of range blood sugar, and generally it will be a high. But last night was a little different.
With the onset of puberty and all the changes that come with that, we have been working extra hard to tighten up our diabetic controls where ever we can. We have been adjusting basal profiles, carb ratios, insulin sensitivity, we even lowered our threshold for corrections at our last Endo appointment. Due to some of these things, we are noticing some changes. Where on a “normal” night, we don’t often see lows, we are now starting to run on the lower end of our target BS range in the middle of the night. This is actually a good thing long term, and both my wife and I are confident that for us, this is the direction we need to head.
The picture above is from last night (6/19-6/20/14). It is a snapshot of 7 hours from our CGM. At 10pm, my wife and I went to bed. We always check her BS when we go to bed. Stella was still awake, and her BS was in the 90’s, so my wife gave her 1 glucose tab. because of that, she set her alarm for a little earlier than normal, 11:30pm. Normally she would set it for 2.5-3 hours later.
Our normal routine after that is to take the dogs outside one last time, put Major on Stella’s bed, Raven goes on her Kuranda next to me, Angus (lucky tiny guy) sleeps with us, and the CGM goes on the end of our dresser. (our bedroom shares a wall with Stella, so in that spot the CGM still is “in range”). Whenever one of us wakes up to check Stella, we glance at the CGM to see what it says and get an idea of what to expect.
My wife checked Stella at 11:30. She was 118 (a great number). At 12:53 Raven woke me up. The CGM read 91, and Stella was actually 83 (Raven alerts to anything under 85). I gave Stella (while she still slept) a couple of sips on a juice box. My wife checked her again at 2:30 am and she was 150 (again, not a bad number for night time). At 3:55 Raven alerted and woke me up again. The CGM read 161 and Stella was actually 172. Again, she alerts to anything over 165. This allowed me to bolus her and as you can see, at 7am she was a beautiful 126. Good girl Raven!
Now, if you read between the lines, what you will notice is that there were 5 checks last night. 4 of them involved being woken up in the middle of the night, 1 of them was on our way to bed. 2 of those we were woken up to alarm clocks, and when those checks were made, Stella was in range. But that 2:30 night time check could have been radically different if Raven didn’t wake me up at 12:53 to a low. Hopefully, the CGM would have eventually alarmed (it alarms under 85) and woken us up. But as you can see, we don’t wake up less because we have these dogs. We wake up more. These dogs don’t reduce the amount of checks or work that we need to do, they increase it. One of the other things you will notice is why we find night checks so important.
It works for us, and we wouldn’t have it any other way. Thank you Raven, for working so diligently last night.
Team Blackdogsrule
