The key to being a good diabetes educator must be to bend with the wind, otherwise my diabetes educator is going to end up pulling her hair out and hating me. From 6am to 9am I was fasting and got a consistent blood glucose level of 183 to 184. From 10am to 11am my BGL jumped up for no apparently reason, although I was waking up at that point. At 10am I was 232 and 11am at 239. This is fairly good evidence that my basal rate is pretty close to correct.

We call this the fasting basal rate - it's very useful if you accidently skip a meal to avoid having a hypo. Yesterday I consumed 60 units of insulin of which 19.2 units went to basal. That means that 33% was basal and 67% was bolus. 33:66 is not the ratio that my educator has been prescribed to. No, she expects to end up with something close to 50:50 ratio.

So I started to google, because having any correlation between basal and bolus seems kinda weird to me - what should my day-to-day choice of meal really have to do with the day-to-day background requirements for my nervous system and brain? I'm sure there is some correlation but why would it be 50:50 ?

I hit the forums and found other people asking the same question and having calibrated their basal the same way - fasting to ensure that the numbers stay constant. They were ending up with similar numbers to me even.. which further lends to my skepticism of the magic 50:50 constant. I wrote an email to my educator pointing this out with the hard data and we'll see how she reacts. I'll report back here when the dust settles on this one.

Right now I'm trying a bolus experiment - I took 40g of carbs which the pump offered me 5.7 units of insulin and 3.5 units of insulin as a correction to get back in to the normal range. I believe this will not happen. Prior to going on to the pump, my carb ratio was 1:5.. currently on the pump it's set to 1:7. I suspect that the correction insulin will end up being part of the food bolus and I'll end up with a bgl that's roughly similar to what it is right now (239mg/dl).

At what point should I throw up my hands and say "Look, I'm pretty sure I know what's going on here... give me some hard evidence to tell me I'm wrong or get on board and help me fine tune this." ... I don't know exactly, but I do know that I expect to stay >=180mg/dl for the rest of the day and I'm not at all happy about it. At around afternoon tea when the results come back - I'll either be right in my prediction or pleasantly surprised.

I guess I'm happy to play the "incremental changes" game, because it's a smart thing to do - but the way we began this process, the numbers launched me far away from *my* expected norms... which is why this has been a rather unpleasant experience. I'm not being impatient, I'm just paying very close attention to my condition and I wish the educator would pay more attention or at least justify her expected numbers beyond simply repeating them as if they were set in stone.

I'm a programmer who lives by the law "put up or shut up" .. and as far as I'm concerned, right now I'm putting up the real numbers with the real results and the most logical analysis of them. I'm changing one variable at a time to demonstrate a real correlation. Okay, I'm going to stop now before I rant too much more.