Diabetes And Illness

So, as anyone who has been keeping up knows, Adam has been ill since last Thursday. As of Sunday Simon started puking, although he’s pretty much fine now. I thought I had escaped it until I woke up this morning will an achy ear and a sore throat.

And with my fasting blood sugar at 8.5 mmol/L (millimoles per liter, the scale used everywhere, except the US, for blood glucose levels. The US uses mg/dL (milligrams per deciliter). For my US audience, 8.5 mmol/L = 153 mg/dL). Ideally it should be under 8, which it has been for weeks and weeks so it was too high this morning. Another sign something was wrong with me.

Also, Adam threw up again last night and has been pulling and rubbing at his ear. Oh how I long for the sentence ‘Mummy, my ear feels weird/hurts’. Or not!

So anyway, rang the GP and said we both needed to be seen and off we went.

It would appear I am viral, which means fluids, rest (HA! I’ve done, approximately 1,001 loads of laundry since Thursday, all of which need to be folded so we can find the spare room) and keep an eye on my glucose. Adam, however, does indeed have a double ear infection and a red throat, so he’s on antibiotics.

So what can I do if my glucose is too high? Not much, really. I take metphormin, not insulin, so I can’t adjust that. I can watch my carbs, obviously, which I do anyway (more or less) and eat less of them if necessary. But it’s more to be aware of my levels and if they get really high (above 10 mmol/L is high, above 12 mmol/L is really high) to call the diabetes nurses.

I also have a diabetes clinic appointment on Thursday so if I am still running high I can discuss it with one of the diabetologist while I’m there.

So why does a viral infection affect (effect?) my blood sugar? Because my body is too busy fighting the infection to worry about dealing with my blood sugar, basically. Most likely if a non-diabetic had a viral infection and tested their blood, and had a baseline to compare it to, as I do, theirs would run high as well.

So at the moment, Adam is napping and I’m contemplating what to have for lunch.

I am thinking ice cream and white bread would be very very bad choices. 🙂

Posted in Adam, Diabetes and tagged .

7 Comments

  1. Affect is the verb, effect is the noun. So being ill affects your diabetes, and high blood sugar is the effect.

  2. yup, when the husband had a severe cellulitis infection they had him on a diabetic diet in hospital because his sugars went crazy!

    hope you feel better soon. xx

  3. I have a hard time with affect/effect too.

    Are tubes an option? They really helped Josh. I wish I had gotten them for him earlier. By the time I got them for him he was already speech delayed because of the ear infections and fluid build up. They made it so he couldn’t hear well. He had speech therapy until he was in 3rd grade,even though he had his first tubes put in right before he turned 3. He still has issues with some words.

    I hope that the new doctor can help you guys some relief. Poor Adam just has to be miserable all the time. And that’s so hard on us as parents.

  4. Clara that’s what I think the ENTs are going to want to do, grommets, as they are called here. Or maybe remove his tonsils. I just want him to *not* have 7 courses of antibiotics in the next 6 months like he’s had in the last 7!

    His hearing is testing fine, thank goodness!

  5. Getting his tonsils out can help a lot. And they can do it at the same time. He should do really well with a tonsillectomy at his age. Josh had his done when he was 4 and he was bouncing all over the place late that day.

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