Travel with Type 1 Diabetes

I'm posting this blog after a while.  My work was getting hectic and as a result I couldnt keep up with the blog.  I hope I can do this more regularly going forward.

Our first travel to India was for couple weeks about 13 days after his diagnosis.  We were planning to go India during the December break.  Tickets were booked weeks before Sriram's diagnosis.  On the day of Sriram's diagnosis, one of the questions I had was, how to handle this travel and if we should go at all.  Our doctors and diabetic educators assured us we should be able to travel to India less than 2 weeks after the diagnosis. They just cautioned us that we have to make sure we always eat clean food and drink boiled water.  Basically, the thought is to make sure Sriram doesn't get any infections.  The doctor did make a passing reference that we can expect some high blood sugars as Sriram would be excited to see his grand parents. But, that didn't prepare me for the numbers we were going to see ultimately.

We were told low blood sugars are dangerous and therefore, we have to give only the right amount of insulin required for food.  Sriram has never liked the food served in flights.  Also, no airlines have the carb counts for the food.  As a result, we were just guessing the carbs in each dish and calculated the insulin based on the chart.  I was more concerned about Sriram dropping than going high due to the sugary desserts and juices.  Sriram is a very easy kid to fly with.  He will be happy as long as he has his deserts and juices :-).  This is all old story.

Now, fast forward to 2018 December.  Sriram is on Dexcom G6 and Loop Artificial Pancreas System.  This means that he we can not only see his numbers constantly, but also that the insulin delivery is managed by the Loop sysem with out much of an intervention. Finally, surprise surprise Sriram finished most meals in the flight!  This definitely helped us avoid lows in the flight.

The management of blood sugars was lot easier than I thought as I was with Sriram for a majority of the time.  I just gave him one glucose tab(4 grams) whenever his blood glucose drift down below 80.  Similarly, I just made sure that loop is working when ever his blood glucose goes above 140.  This is the summary of Sriram's blood glucose pattern at the end of 2 weeks!

Sriram put a brave face during all those highs and lows.  He didn't mind me pushing those glucose tabs down his mouth even when we were outside.  I'm really proud that we managed to get those numbers despite the fact that he ate as much as he wants!

Also, I want to highlight  here is that he ate incredible number of carbs through out the trip.  At one point, he was having ice creams almost every day.  I don't even need to mention about those delicious Indian sweets here.  But, the irony is one of the instances when his blood sugar spiked was after eating Noodles.  This is so absurd because noodles is food and ice cream is something that is considered as unhealthy  by  many  and that could be avoided.  But, the fact is some of the "food" we have every day might be more harmful than the things we avoid because of the age old beliefs.  The other thing to be noted is that noodles "might" spike the blood sugar for everybody.  Its just that we were able to see that visibly in Sriram as he has a CGM.  Finally, at the end of the day, the trip was lot better than I expected.

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