Mr. Footless would like more sex

Yesterday Mr. Footless woke me up from a tired sleep at 5:30 am with a blood sugar of 26.  Anything under 40 means ambulance call due to being either totally non compus or combative and uncooperative.  So they lined him and packed him off to the emergency room.
I picked him up about 7:30.  He was apologetic, sort of, and told me that he had a lovely day of my driving him around on errands set up. 
I had a day with visiting a friend and doing a bit of shopping with no one in the car with me in mind
  I got back about three and was altering a dress and adding the snaps and hemming down the facings when Mr Footless asked me to go down to the pawn shop and let him look at a new telly as the one we have had for the last ten years is giving notice that it is soon to be on it's way to the recycle.
He added that he would like to take me out to dinner.  So OK that's nice and the dress and I got into the truck and we went down to the pawn shop, and then we went off to eat.  He said that he was feeling a bit funny and when he got to the restaurant he was showing signs of having a low.  I fed him a glucose and got inside with him.  Mr. Footless likes the salad bar at this place and he made noises about picking up a salad and it wasn't until he got to the end of the bar minus any food that I realized that he was in a lot more trouble than I might have thought   
The upshot of all this preliminary history is that about 5:00 pm I was putting in a second call to 911 and they were treating Mr. Footless in the middle of this restaurant in the middle of the evening rush on a Saturday night.  His Blood sugar was 30. Of course they bundled him off to the Emergency room again leaving me to figure out what to do next. 
The manager couldn't have been nicer.  The waitress was utterly kind.  I ordered my (and his) meal to go and sat at the bar until it was ready.  They offered me a shot of tequila to calm my nerves.  Too bad I don't drink. I can just imagine what that might have been like on an empty stomach, Me being all of 105 pounds of completely pissed off. That wouldn't have ended well.
It turns out that Mr. Footless had an object lesson in why you don't take a bolus dose for food until you are heading down to the restaurant, and what happens if you do.
Much later, after bed time when I was sinking into sleep Mr. Footless suggested that we hadn't been close for a few weeks and maybe we should......
And you wouldn't want to be there for what I said. 

Enlightenment happens

Mr Footless has been struggling with the pump.  I finally realized something about Mr Footless that will make dealing with things much easier.
Mr Footless is high blood sugar phobic.  The struggles that he has had are there because he fears high blood sugar and the complications so much that he prefers to put his life in danger by going low.
So the" leave things high and work them out slowly" approach really really doesn't work.
Today I set his bolus settings to something that is going to overdose him.  He will be much better about tapering things from low to high than high to low. 
The professionals don't get this. I do. 

Steeeep learning curve with random remarks.

Things have been moving along.  The pump is working but not as well as we would like.  There are still too many lows.  When lows happen on the pump at least you can shut it down  so that you aren't fighting the infusing insulin on top of the low.  none the less, we have been cutting the amount of base that Mr Footless gets at night.  We are still too high but this takes time.  The programmed amounts for food and getting down from the highs are too small.  we have improved this by a lot but it still isn't right. Another piece of unexpected education; infusion sets and hairy bellies make for horrible defoliation scenes when you take the old set off.  The way to make it work right is to take the tube off the set,draw around the adhesive with a sharpie, choose the site for the next set. shave it, insert the new set. and only then remove the old one.
We got the first electric and gas bills that mean something since the weatherization. after the first month with the heat on consistently our gas bill (Last year at this time 124.00) was..... 43.00.  The electric bill dropped by 16 dollars with the new refrigerator.  Hurrah.

Mr Footless continues to wrestle the pump into submission

Mr Footless is not terribly happy with me.  The problem is that I read and comprehend direction and procedure easily and well. I am also a lot more at home with technology than he is.  The idea that the pump can make the calculations and administer the right bolus faster and easier than he can is counter to his life view.
This morning I helped him change the tubing and put in a new reservoir.  He discovered that eating and not administering a bolus dose is not a good idea, over all, and he begins to have a handle on it.  His morning blood sugars are still too low but over all he's doing good.

in which I consider whacking Mr Footless upside the head

Mr Footless Man has a number of things that I admire.  He is gentle, compassionate and he never teases me on a sore point.  He has among his more interesting qualities the ability to persist.  He doesn't back up any better than a pig, and he will apply himself to a problem and come to some sort of resolution by sheer stubborn bull hardheadedness. 
The fact that he has survived in as good health as he has is a tribute to his participation in his own care.  He put the pro in proactive back when MD meant Minor Deity (and the patient was supposed to do what the doctor said and no argument) and has participated in his care mostly to his better health and sometimes to his detriment.
After an intensive class and a week of studying the manuals, Mr Footless decided to begin using the insulin pump.  The first thing he told me was that he wanted to reprogram the basal dose and approximately double it.
I refrained from screaming (you have no idea how this is going to affect you and you want to fiddle with the numbers because you think they are wrong???? )and suggested through clenched teeth that he not mess with the programs until he had been on the pump for at least 48 hours.
  He grumphed but did as I suggested.  Good thing too.  Twelve hours in and I am pretty sure that he may need the base dose dialed back a bit.  It looks good so far.  His blood sugars are within reason and he seems to be getting the idea of letting the machine do the thinking.
I will be checking on him in a minute before I head in to bed.  it has been a long day.