Misbehaving Pizza Carbs

The only thing worse than spending half the night chasing a rogue high is getting up in the wee hours to do a routine check and getting slugged in the gut by a 3.4 blood sugar! Such was the case a couple of nights ago. At 2:00am my hubby and I found ourselves having to shake off the sleepies, crack open a juice box and attempt to feed o.j. to our incredibly sleepy toddler.

Jenna doesn't often get juice these days, for obvious reasons. So when she has a low and requires juice or carb tabs (which she calls 'vitamins') it's a pretty exciting occasion for her. However, this night, the need for sleep was overriding her usual enthusiasm for these "treats". She was a very reluctant participant in our pre-dawn juice party, to say the least.

After much coaxing and pleading Jenna finally woke up enough to take a few sips of her orange juice. It doesn't take much for Jenna to boost her numbers back up to the good range so a third of the box's contents consumed, approximately 5 carbs, was sufficient to put my mind at ease again. Then it was a matter of reading Jenna a short story to help her resettle, making a trip down the hall to comfort and reassure my older daughter, Jaz, who by now was awake and upset by the goings on, set my alarm for half an hour to do the necessary recheck ensuring the juice did it's thing, and settle myself back into bed.

In addition to waging war on night time hypos, I've been working on cracking the pizza carb code. I just can't swear off pizza for ever. My family enjoys it too much and it's a great way to have a night off occasionally when I've forgotten to defrost something or I just need to spend an evening keeping the couch from floating up into the atmosphere. Tonight was one of those nights I feared the sofa may just slip into orbit so I ordered the pizza then promptly got to surfing the net, looking for nutritional information on pizza.

I found a great little website, calorielab.com, that lists over 500 restaurant's menus and 70 000 foods and our favourite pizza delivery joint just happened to be on here. I was able to get a more accurate carb count and judging from her bedtime reading, I think I finally cracked the code!! How exciting! I do tend to feel a little like Indiana Jones at times with the way diabetes has me running through a continuous series of obstacles, dodging traps, solving riddles and searching for clues in an effort to help my daughter obtain her "holy grail"; perfect blood sugar, or as close to perfect as we can get.

Diabetes has a way of keeping you on your toes, and just when you start to relax and settle back into your seat, it throws something new and unexpected at you to remind you NOT to get too comfy. You've got to keep your wits about you. Life with diabetes certainly isn't dull.

...and as if the fates have seen fit to help me demonstrate my point, just did a midnight check on Jenna and she's 18.1! A correction bolus is given and I must accept the obvious fact that the pizza carb "code" remains uncracked. Curses! Foiled again! What am I doing wrong?