Alaska Tour Wrapup, part 3
One of the most important things I learned during my bicycle tour was about my new OmniPod insulin pump. Its PDM (Personal Diabetes Manager) which I use to do all of the programming of the pump (bolus delivery, basal rate setting, etc.) has a glucose test meter built into it. I learned to be suspicious of the test results it gave me because it can occasionally give wildly inaccurate results.
For example, on the third-to-last day of the tour (my 87 mile ride from Burley, Idaho to Snowville, Utah), I had stopped to take a glucose test. I got a reading of 403 mg/dL which is dangerously high (a normal reading would be in the range of 80-120 mg/dL).
It’s a good thing I didn’t immediately deliver a big correction bolus of insulin. Instead, I rinsed my hands well with water, and then re-tested. This time I got a 107 which is perfect. I must have gotten my hand contaminated with some glucose from something. It was probably my bottle of sports drink. This kind of wildly wrong reading happened on a number of occasions on my tour. What I learned over the course of my tour is this: while bicycling, always use one hand to handle the bottle with the sports drink and the other hand for glucose testing. To do otherwise risks contamination and a dangerously inaccurate blood glucose reading. Related to this, I learned to always re-test when I have a high reading that doesn’t make sense.
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