How do you know if you have an air bubble?

[BrendaK]

We were out to dinner last night and Carson's blood sugar was 400 before we started eating!!!! I checked his site, it looked great, insulin was not exposed to heat and it was a new bottle, I went through everything. Anyways, we had to give him 2 mega doses before it came down a couple of hours later. I think it would have come down sooner, but we were eating mexican with the never ending bowl of tortilla chips...

I am pretty sure it was an air bubble in the tubing, but how can you tell? His sets of tubing are really hard to see through -- I would never be able to tell just from looking at the tubing. Sometimes when I change sets there is an air bubble that has formed in the cartridge, but it is always sitting in the bottom of the cartridge.

Carson had a bowl of cereal before dinner and I bolus him accordingly. He was at 180 before the cereal, then 2 hours later he was at 400. After the 2 mega doses, he came down to 130 by 10pm. (Then from all of the fatty mexican food he rebounded to 375 at 3am, but since I knew the site was working, we just corrected and he was fine this morning.)

Any air bubble insights?

[bkfkmc]

I'm not sure about the air bubbles, but my son's Pedi Endo' nurse told me that cereal has that effect on bg and advised me to feed him breakfast that is more "stable" because my son would always be really high after eating cereal for breakfast. I asked if different cereals would do better and she said no that it has to do with the processing. My son still eats cereal, but I am more aware of this now. We are not junk food junkies by any means and never have been, but I am not going to completely take everything away either. At least now I know to watch for this. I don't know if this could be at all related with what you experienced, but I thought I would share the info.

[BrendaK]

Thanks for the reply. I don't think it was the cereal. It was a regular bowl of unsweetened cheerios that he has all the time with no problems. We have higher blood sugars with certain cereals, but never with cheerios.

I know a lot of people say they have air bubble problems and I just wonder if there a way you can tell if it was that or something else.

That's interesting the endo said all cereals have the same effect. I would have thought lucky charms would have a different effect than say kashi go lean (whole grain cereal with a lot of protein).

[CarrieP]

There really is no way of knowing for sure about bubbles.... We have weird spikes on a regular basis (once or twice a week, besides the daily spikes for which we know the source!!) that have no explanation.We are sure that sometimes it is due to bubbles.... If it happens more than once, we change the site because we found that sometimes, even if the site is "good", it may be in a bad area where absorption has just seemed to stop or slow down. I have heard of new bottles of insulin being bad, too, but we have never experienced it. So don't assume that a bottle is "good" if it was just opened. This is just another part of the mystery of Diabetes... Becoming detectives is part of the job I guess.

We love our pump, but it certainly hasn't been perfected, yet!!! Let's keep praying for that cure!!!!

CarrieP (Mom of Rachel,3, Dx'd 18 mos, pumping since 9/05)