The joys of basal testing.

Basal testing.

Two words that strike fear into the hearts of most pumpers. Especially me. Generally these mean forgoing all food and subsisting on water for a period of several hours and testing at least on the hour every hour. For me I test every half hour. This is just for in the day. Should you wish to do the same at night an alarm clock is needed and the results can be interpreted the next day once the jaded tiredness has worn off.
Not so for me. Give that yesterday I wanted to basal test in the small hours I thought it'd be a simple matter of setting a few alarms on my phone and waking up and testing when they went off. No such luck. Diabetes never makes anything easy nor does my body it seems.
So, the original plan was to start at three in the morning and work my way forward until about seven testing every hour. The three o'clock test went fine. The trouble came after it. The trouble was in the form of me not being able to get back to sleep after the first test. After half an hour of tossing and turning in my pit I decided to abandon any notion that sleep was going to come. After that decision was made I then decided to stay up and test every half hour. I managed to do so until half past ten, some seven and a half hours later on. The results were wonderful and highlighted an interesting pattern as you will see now:
03:00 - 6.5
03:30 - 6.2
04:00 - 5.2
04:30 - 5.2
05:00 - 4.9 Note, this is where it starts to get interesting. How long can I last until I hypo?
05:30 - 4.7
06:00 - 4.7
06:30 - 5.1 Doth the dawn phenomenon rear it's ugly head? I think so!
07:00 - 5.7
07:30 - 6.3
08:00 - 5.8
08:30 - 5.9
09:00 - 5.6
09:30 - 6.4
10:00 - 6.1
10:30 - 6.4

Now I know I can be a bit of a perfectionist but the drop that occurs between 03:00 and 05:30 is a little worrying. Having had a few hypos at about the 05:00 mark that have woken me up this seems to fit the pattern should I have gone to bed on a slightly low BG of about 5 mmol/L the night before. Then there's the rise that happens between 05:30 and 07:30. I do suspect that there is a little bit of dawn phenomenon occuring there. On that note, I have made changes to suit both of the trends that came up in my basal test. Tomorrow I intend to have a repeat performance to see if the changes have been to my good. I also intend to basal test until about midday to see if there is any rise after 09:00 until 12:00 as I've had a fair few days when I've tested pre lunch (usually between 12:00 and 13:30) and have been above ten.

Fingers crossed about tomorrow's basal test. I'll do a post after I've done it. I also need to basal test in the late afternoon/early evening to see what effect the early darkness has had on me.