BI insulin running out

I am currently on Humalin I as a BI insulin, taking it at 7am/7.30am and again at 10pm. It covers my levels over night but the last two evenings yesterday and today I experienced a spike into double figures at 5pm, it seems that the BI is only lasting for 10 hours!

To correct I had to take Novorapid but very high doses, last night 15 of Novorapid brought my levels down from 15 to 8 and I exeperienced no hypo and ate nothing. I am fairly new to Humalin I having been switched from Lantus four weeks ago. Has anyone else experienced this as I am not keen on having to take such high levels of Novorapid to rectify with such little affect.

Hello Justin,

I switched the other way a few years ago from Humalin to Lantus, and I don't remember it being a problem,although at the time, I was on BI only due to the honeymoon period.

Are you taking breakfast around 7 am? If so, then one answer may be to increase your breakfast QA ratio a bit, and push your morning BI time out to 10 am, giving you an extra few hours at the other end of the day before it runs out. This would hopefully coincide with dinner, and you can increase your QA slightly then to get you to your 10 pm BI dose.

Another alternative would be asking to switch back to Lantus, or onto another BI like Levemir (although if you were switched off Lantus, then there may have been good reasons for doing so).

Lastly, you could split your BI into three injections, with the existing two as is, and a third around midday to see you through to your evening dose.

With Lantus, although it is billed at 24 hours, I found that it lasted about 20, and increasing my dinner QA led to hypos. Splitting my Lantus dose into a morning and evening dose solved the issue.

For that reason, that third option may be your best option. There would be a bit of trial and error though as to what each BI dose should be. Ideally, you would want to take each dose about 8 hours apart, and then work out if taking a third of your total daily BI for each dose was appropriate.