Bad Swag

I am by no means an expert on swagging my carb counts (for those that don’t know, that’s a coined term for guessing how many carbs are in a food item/meal). But I can usually get it pretty darn close. And it helps that I’m pretty much a creature of habit and eat a lot of the same things – that just makes life a lot easier for me so I don’t have to guess. And so I don’t have to go through what happened today ….

I woke up today again with a magical unicorn number. And then we went to have breakfast at a local cafe which we frequent often. My usual meal there is very low carb – eggs, fruit, and bacon.  I usually don’t even bolus for the fruit because it’s such a small bowl. And my blood sugar is usually pretty spot on afterwards. But today my husband had ordered pancakes and asked if I wanted to share.  Normally I would say no because I do eat pretty healthy most of the time but today I decided it was bolus-worthy because these were super yummy homemade pancakes.

I looked online to see how many carbs would be in that size of pancake it was around 35 carbs pretty consistently on all the sites I checked out.  Took my shot and devoured the yumminess.

Then this happened …..

 

 

I then remembered ….. this had happened once before about a year ago, and that time I had asked the restaurant to find out what they put in the pancake mix that makes them so good. And it was ……. drumroll please …….. Sprite.  Ruh roh.   It’s super unfortunate that I had forgotten that because a) I could have skipped it all together, or b) I could have taken more insulin.   So I fought through the usual high blood sugar symptoms for a couple of hours – extreme fatigue and thirst and frequent potty breaks … until the correction dose I took via syringe kicked in – and boy did it.   I am currently back to normal at a beautiful steady 95 but it wears you out having that high of a spike.    It’s my responsibility to know what is in the food, but it made me also think of how it would be awesome if restaurants could provide carb counts like they do calorie counts (this particular restaurant does post the calories on the menu).   I know that would be an expense for restaurants to do that but if they’re already posting the calories, really how much more work would that be?

Something I am thankful for, though, is that since I had my Dexcom on, I was able to catch this high as soon as it started spiking which created an opportunity to give myself a correction much earlier than I probably would have if I didn’t know.  I usually would only test before meals and sometimes 2 hours afterwards – but I knew this was happening before I had even gotten home after eating breakfast.