It's 9am, Saturday morning. It's been two weeks-ish since I changed insulins from a mixtard 70/30 to Novorapid + Levemir, so I think it's a good idea for me to describe my experiences so far to help any one else who's going through the same thing now or in the future.

First of all, I'm still producing some insulin. And let's also keep in mind that a Type 2 using insulin uses significantly more insulin than a Type 1 (I don't know why that is).

My doctor first prescribed me with Morning: 6 NR, Lunch: 8 NR, Dinner 8 NR + 8 L.

The first day on that prescription I got a Hypo in the evening. We dropped the dosages back to Morning: 5 NR, Lunch: 6 NR, Dinner: 6 NR + 8 L.

Let me just explain for a moment what's going on here. The pancreas follows a basal/bolus pattern with its insulin producing. The basal is a constant stream of insulin to balance other sugars in the body and hormones. The bolus happens every time you eat a meal.

To closely simulate what the body does and therefore get really good control over my blood sugars, we simulate the basal and bolus with multiple injections of insulin. Lantis and Levemir are two 'long acting' insulins that can be used to simulate the basal. Then you use a fast short acting insulin such as Novorapid or Accrapid. There are several of those around.

The problem has been that those dosages my doctor put me on turned out to be too low. My bgl average was around 10.5 and my standard deviation was 2.9 - that meant I was regularly up at a blood glocuse level of 13 around 50% of the time. Not good.

I managed to push the average down by increasing my Novorapid at meals to Morning: 6 NR, Lunch: 7 NR, Dinner: 7 NR and kept doing a Levemir of 8 at dinner time.

My blood glocuse measurements were starting to look respectable. After dinner I'm hovering between 7-9 bgl now and that's pretty good. But when I wake up in the morning, I'm back to 12. So I spoke to my doctor last night about this - it was clear that I wasn't taking enough Levemir. I have thus far had no experience in adjusting my own Levemir dosages, so I sought my doctor's wise opinion.

He upped the dosage to 10 at night. Last night I was around 9.5 and this morning I'm.. you guessed it.. at about 12. So.... I'll have to give it a few more days of trial to see what's really going on, but I also decided to hit some forums about this.

I found a forum of people who switched from Lantis to Levemir and found out some very interesting things:

a) You need around 130% dosage with Levermir compared to what you'd have with Lantis

b) Lantis makes you put on weight

c) Low blood glocuse through the night can give you nightmares

d) Several people, who used the same Lantis dosage with Levemir complained of having high blood glocuse in the morning. They upped their dosages and fixed that apparently.

e) Type 2's who are insulin dependant use a shit load of insulin, sometimes more than 60 in a shot, requiring two shots! That makes me glad I'm not going to have that problem.

So we'll see how things progress from here and hopefully I'll finally hit that stability, then refine it nicely with the DAFNE course sometime next year. Then may be I'll consider going on an insulin pump to reduce the 4 injections a day to 1 injection every three days.