Ever since I was a child I had a hard time getting to sleep at night. I remember my mom taking me to the pediatrician once when I was about 9 or 10 years old and asking them what I could do to help me get to sleep quicker. I would lay in bed at night, sometimes for hours, staring at the ceiling, or doing leg and arm exercises to hopefully tire my body. During college staying up late never seemed to be an issue because let's be honest, no good party started until 10:00pm at the earliest anyways :-)
While my issues with getting to sleep at night have pretty much diminished, I have run into a newer issue: staying asleep. To be honest, I can't remember a night where I haven't woken up at least once or twice (if not more) during the night in the last year. Of course there is the occasional bad dream (and I tend to dream A LOT) that abruptly wakes me, but many of the reasons I am up so much in the middle of the night are related to the diabetes.
Before I had the Continuous Glucose Monitor or the Insulin Pump, the only reasons I would be up in the middle of the night would be that I felt a low or high blood sugar. I would wake up feeling a little different, finally convince myself to get out of bed, turn on the light, and check my blood sugar. With low blood sugars I would have to find something to eat and wait the 15-20 minutes for my blood sugars to even out before I could get back to sleep. With a high blood sugar I would have to find some insulin, give myself an injection, and then I would have no issue getting back to bed because high blood sugars generally tend to make me sleepy anyways. At any rate, these episodes were often disruptive.
Within the last year though I have added the Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM) and Insulin Pump to my life, that besides their numerous advantages, can sometimes cause even more disruptions to my sleep. The transmitter (little cell-phone like machine that tells me my blood sugars) for the CGM has to be within 5 feet of my body in order to get a reading. At night I usually put it on my nightstand or under my pillow. I have set it to beep at me if it goes higher or lower than certain blood sugar numbers. Sometimes the CGM will end up beeping at me, and in which case I will get up and correct a high or low blood sugar if needed. These disruptions seem to be happening less and less with the tighter control I have no with the insulin pump. Yay!
What I do notice myself doing though, that is almost comical now, is waking up naturally throughout the night at almost the same times during the night just to check the number on my CGM. My husband and I get in bed anywhere between 10:00 and 11:00 at night and I have a tendency to open my eyes around 12:30, 3:00, and 5:00 (give or take a half hour or so) each night just to adjust my body position and check my CGM. I appreciate the easiness of knowing my blood sugar right away but man oh man, what's a girl got to do around here to get a full night's sleep?? All joking aside, it's really not all that bothersome and probably just something I have naturally gotten used to. And something my husband has had to get used to as well. As a matter of fact, when he hears me stir in the middle of the night he's set on auto-pilot to ask "Are you okay?" and "How is your blood sugar?" Just another thing we all adjust to maintain the success of the diabetes.
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