Steam train on a morning of high blood glucose
Today’s wander was in the morning only: I went to a rural train station in Fukushima Prefecture just south of Aizu-Wakamatsu Station to try and catch a once-in-52 years steam train going by.
It was a Sunday, what was supposed to be a day off from the rails. But this was a chance I had to take; unfortunately, BG was high the entire morning.
Last night had ended with a low CGM BG alarm, and I’d had glucose and gone to sleep. Overnight – maybe a result of the rapid pace of travel lately – my BG didn’t just get better, but got better and kept rising, very slowly.
At 7:00 am it was 153, not a disaster. I had a small, quick breakfast at my hotel buffet, taking my usual insulin, and walked twenty minutes to the train station.
Walking after breakfast is always a good thing, and I thought that would help ease mine down into range.
It didn’t.
Around 8:00 am I went over 200, and that’s where I stayed. I was really not paying close attention to it, to be honest. Post-breakfast highs are not unusual and, with the walking I was doing, I expected it to go down.
Plus I was focused on trying to capture the steam train with my drone and other cameras.
The train went by, and I rode my normal train back to Aizu-Wakamatsu. It was only around here that I manually checked my BG with my CGM, my first check since waking up. It was 175. So, not knowing what had happened in between, I figured I’d been pretty good all morning.
But when I saw the graph, I saw the real story: I’d been in the mid-200s all morning out in the rice fields. The peak was 254, right as I was walking back to Amaya Station.
I had a simple little lunch from a convenience store at the station, and before eating I was 119. So, it all worked out, it just took a long time. A long, high arc.
The rest of the day I stayed inside and researched the next day’s train plan. And BG was a bit up and down all day, to be honest. Maybe too much going on and not enough sleep. These sorts of stresses usually aren’t good for T1D.
