BG report from the Ohmi Railway, day 2
A beautiful mess of a rural train line • Ohmi Railway
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Today I finished exploring the Ohmi Railway in Shiga Prefecture, Japan. Had a good first half of the day, blood sugar-wise, but after lunch things got really bad – and wouldn’t get better for a while. I don’t even really know why.
BG hovered right around 130 all night as I slept in my “shipping container” hotel near Gokashō Station in the city of Higashi-Ōmi. When I woke up at 7:30 it was 179, because it nearly always rises from around 5:00 am.
I had my shots and ate breakfast in the room that I bought at the convenience store last night.
I managed to avoid a post-breakfast spike. It only got to 163 before leveling out and heading slowly back down. Looked like today would be my lucky day.
Around 10:30 I was 92, and was still moving around and walking a fair amount, so I had a quick snack.
After walking and climbing around Hachiman Mountain to see the views over Lake Biwa and visit impressive little Zuiryū-ji Temple, I found a ramen place for lunch beside Ōmi-Hachiman Station. Blood sugar was 126.
And that’s where the goodness ended.
I took a full five units of Humalog for the bowl of ramen I had – and I worried that that dose was too much, since I was planning on doing a significant bit of walking after lunch. So I resolved to keep an eye on it.
Well, it wasn’t too much. BG climbed up into the 200s after that. I began a three-kilometer walk and it dipped below 200 for a while.
But by the time I was on a JR train heading back to Ōsaka, I was shocked to see I was 239. Quite a bit higher than I expected.
On the train I took five more units of Humalog, enough for another tiny snack (with hot coffee from a vending machine) and to get the high down.
But it didn’t work. When I got home, at 6:00 pm, I was even higher: 277. It would reach over 300 (!) before another shot finally brought it down to around 100 in the wee hours.
I asked ChatGPT why the BG might have spiked. It blamed the fat and protein in the ramen. Possibly, I guess; but I eat ramen regularly and that never happens. My own theory was that the ramen may have contributed, but the main cause was not enough water over these two days.
Whatever the cause, at least it was only a few hours. Would be better to have avoided that hours-long rise altogether, but things eventually settled. And I got to experience a rather glorious train line.
