My Son, The Human Guinea Pig

Pizza. We have a love hate relationship. We love the way it tastes, but we hate the numbers Brendon gets from it five hours afterward.

We typically weigh the pizza that we happen to get from the same place every time, dose him for what he's eaten and extend the bolus for about 2 1/2 hours. We'll test him after a couple of hours and the number generally looks good, but Every. Single. Time we find the same pattern, a high of anywhere from the high 200's to the mid 300's about 5 hours afterward.

So I went searching for a dosing technique that would give us better results. Here's what I found: Diabetes and Pizza: Slow and Steady Wins the Race.

In the article, it states three ways researchers dosed for pizza to get optimal results. Mind you, this was done to adults...kids react way differently. I won't get into all three, but the third had the most success, so I figured I'd follow what the researchers did for that.

Basically "half of the insulin was given in one dose immediately before the meal, and the other half was administered slowly via the pump over the following eight hours."

I figured I'd give it a shot. As soon as Brendon sat down to eat, I gave him a bolus for half the pizza plus his milk. As soon as he was finished eating, I dosed him for the pizza he ate (minus what he didn't) and extended his bolus for 8 hours. Here are the results:

6:30 p.m.: 264 (this was a result of a messy race to push his glucose up because he was low from playing outside...this is incidental)

8:30 p.m.: 170

9:30 p.m.: 209

11:45 p.m.: 218

12:45 p.m.: 142

2:30 a.m.(8 hours later): 77 (I pulled back his basal by 50% for 2 hrs to prevent a further drop. We tested at 7:25 a.m. this morning and he was a 137.

Those numbers sure beat the numbers that we usually get (not that we test him so often afterward on a typical day). So he peaked at 218 rather than what I had mentioned before which is a drastic improvement.

Next Time: If he starts off dinner as high as he did this time, I'll rearrange the dose percentage to be heavier at the first dose and less at the second dose (65/35?). If he starts off lower, then I'll do the 50/50.