Solo road tripping with type 1 diabetes is rough on blood sugar, and it’s not always the reasons you might think. Sure, the car ride is a long stretch of time when you can’t move around, which usually leads to high blood sugar. Then there is the fact that you can’t check your blood sugar like you ordinarily would, so you don’t know what it’s doing or if you need to adjust. But it’s also situations like I encountered tonight, shortly after arriving at my marvelous AirBnB for one in Greensboro, NC (message me if you this recommendation and I will provide!).
I had driven from Asheville to Greensboro earlier in the day ahead of a work-related training that started at 1 pm. Now it was 5 pm, and I had just arrived at my AirBnB. I was getting settled in and also noticing how hungry I was. Hungry and tired of driving. I went to grad school in Greensboro and I was happy to be back, even if only for a night. I arrived 25 min or so ahead of the training and ate cold soup in my hot car because I didn’t have anywhere to heat it, and it’s the only food I had in my house to pack. By the time the training started, my blood sugar was 185 mg/dl – not really that high, but I wanted it to be better while I was sitting there, so I took a correction bolus and it did come down…right in time for the cookie break. I was pretty hungry at this point because, while I had told at first told myself I was enjoying cold soup, halfway through the bowl I was no longer fooled. And then the woman sitting next to me came in with a container of steaming chicken! She had found a microwave. I was jealous and had reached that point in a training where it feels like eating is going to help you concentrate (not sure this works), so I picked out a cookie – and it really was a fabulous cookie. I think it was lemon blueberry, but not artificial at all. I ate the whole thing. My blood sugar shot up into the 200’s. I was now concentrating on this rather than the training, and ended up doing a correction bolus. I am using Fiasp now so the corrections work a lot faster, but sometimes this leads me to over-correct because I think it should be coming down faster than it is – and truth be told I just need to be more patient. By the time I left the training it was headed down but still pretty high. I got to my lodging and I thought about being brave and trying a new spot for dinner, but sometimes when you’re in an old place that you don’t get to spend time in very often, you just have to go to one of your favorites. So I put in an online order for Sticks and Stones, a brick oven pizza place in Sunset Hills that has a cauliflower crust pizza with a savory onion jam and fried eggplant called, “A Kiss Before I Go.” My dream pizza was to be ready in 30 minutes, which was more time than I needed, but Sticks and Stones is in my old neighborhood and I thought I might go the Bestway grocery store or stroll down my old street. I grabbed my phone, which as you know from my recent post is also my insulin pump and CGM. That was when I saw that I was headed straight down…and I felt it too. Yikes. Now my delicious pizza is probably on its way towards the oven, and I am not even able to drive! I need to go pick up my dinner and the only way I can get there is to eat first. It’s a real catch-22. So I grab the snack most efficient at shooting blood sugar through the roof in NO TIME FLAT: dried chili mango from Trader Joe’s. If I did not have diabetes, I would go through a bag a day just for its deliciousness. As it stands, if I eat more than two pieces at a time, all blood sugar hell breaks loose. It worked though, so well that by the time I got to the restaurant nine minutes away I was over 200 mg/dl and rising. I decided to bolus a wee bit to get my insulin going. By the time I got back to the house I was still in the 200’s, but I knew my first dose was active. I then counted my carbs, which is actually literally impossible with a homemade cauliflower crust pizza, because who knows what the ratio of cauliflower to other flour is. It could be straight cauliflower, but it’s probably not. This means it could be anywhere from basically 0 carbs, to nearly on par with regular wheat pizza. So I just guessed and reduced my pump’s suggested dose by 1 unit because I was very excited about walking around Fisher Park afterwards, which is a classic Greensboro charmer of a neighborhood.
I had my dinner on the patio even though it was hot and humid for September and replayed some of my Greensboro memories. I loved my time in Greensboro, even though grad school was demanding and I was more than ready to leave my apartment by the time I finished moving out. There is something special about Greensboro. It’s got this oldness to it, a slow pace, and gardens and parks everywhere. By the time I finished my pizza, my blood sugar was…not high enough for a walk really. I put my pump in activity mode, grabbed some low treats for my fanny-pack, and headed out on my stroll. Groups of runners were hustling by, people with their dogs. I heard an owl although it was still quite light, and looked at the last of summer’s zinnias in the front yard gardens. I passed an old cemetery that I longed to stroll in, but at that point my blood sugar was dropping – two arrows straight down. I had made a loop in order to not be too far from my lodging at any moment. And so, I headed back. All in all, I think I got about a 30-minute walk in, but I wanted much more. That’s the trick of blood sugar. When you need it to be high, it’s often low. And at the other times, you don’t want it to be high but you can’t bring it down. The extra wrinkle of solo travel is that because you’re always the one in charge, you can’t just say, “Hey, can you drive,” I’m going a little low. If I’d had someone else to drive to the pizza, I probably wouldn’t have eaten anything at all and would have just been a little low at the start of my dinner. This might have changed the after-dinner story. But, at the same time, solo travel is special in so many ways. On a solo trip, you make memories that only you have. It’s like having a beautiful stone in your pocket. Something that no one else understands the full significance of. I guess this could seem sad, but I love it. And you get to do just what you want and figure it all out and then tell the stories later. In this way, just like anything else, there are limitations and possibilities sitting side by side. The occasional blood sugar rollercoaster might take you for a ride, but it’s not the whole journey.
