Diabetes Blog – Happy-Medium.net

You know, it’s really hard to get juice from a juice box in the middle of the night.

Think about it… you have to find the juice box (usually in the dark), you have to grab the plastic straw from the side of said juice box, you have to remove the plastic wrap from around the straw, and then you have to poke the juice box with the straw in the tiiiinny little space allocated for that procedure.

That is really difficult to do at one o’clock in the morning when you’re shaking, you’re sleepy, and your vision without all of that would make it hard to see what you’re aiming at anyway.

Well, that was exactly the scenario the other night, and as you can tell, I was successful in the end. But diabetes was also successful in scaring the crap out of me.

My last bolus prior to that was about five hours earlier. Still time for the insulin to affect my blood sugar, but past its peak, I believe. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong. My last BG check was at 10:30, right before bed. For the record, my meter read 135 mg/dL. Not high, not super low, but okay considering my basal rates do a good job of keeping me pretty steady throughout each 24 hour period.

Yet every once in a while complacency bites me in the ass, because diabetes acts different from the way it acts under 90 percent of the other circumstances I’m used to. Those are the dangerous moments. Those are the frustrating moments. Those are the critical moments when I just have to ignore everything else and concentrate my focus on doing the one or two things necessary to keep myself alive.

And make no mistake, keeping yourself alive is exactly what you’re focused on in moments like this.

Maybe the circumstances leading up to this event can help explain why my blood sugar tanked in the middle of the night. But even if they could, it’s like much of the science surrounding diabetes. There’s a link, but you have to look really hard to find it, and when you do, you find that the details are so complicated that it would be hard to remember all of it later on.

When our brains are overloaded with math, prescriptions, doctor visits, and remembering to bolus at the right time (among other things) already, it’s easy to see why most of us don’t get too invested in the causes of our hypoglycemia. It’s very complex, and each scenario could be different anyway. If there’s something that really stands out, like over-blousing or insulin stacking or not factoring in exercise, we identify it and correct it next time. Anything deeper than that, and we’re likely to lose track of it.

Solving lows like this is often like learning the engineering behind sending a rocket into space. There’s so much to know, you can’t possibly learn it all on your own. And unlike science, diabetes changes over time, so even if you learn everything behind today’s low, it might not help you with the one you experience six months from now.

I’m glad everything turned out okay in the end. I worry about those who experience the same circumstances where things don’t turn out okay.

And I still worry about what I don’t know.