Diabetes Blog – Happy-Medium.net

I had a crazy low recently. They don’t happen very often anymore, but on the rare occasions when they do, they’re scary.

It’s hard to describe it to someone who’s never experienced this before. It’s one of those situations where you’re cognizant enough to know what’s happening, but you have to fight like hell to actually perform the task you need to perform to maintain consciousness.

The reason why it happened? Doesn’t matter. Sometimes it’s a more-than-perfectly working infusion site. Sometimes it’s human error. Sometimes it’s unexpected things popping up at the wrong time, a perfect storm.

It doesn’t matter. Not every day will be perfect. Let me repeat that again: Not every day will be perfect.

I tell people who know nothing or next to nothing about diabetes that hypoglycemia, especially this kind of low, is a near death experience. Especially when you’re alone in the house, having difficulty maintaining your balance, using every ounce of energy to get the will to get fast-acting carbs into your system, then hoping they’ll work faster than ever before.

It’s every bit as scary as that sounds.

Technology and Bluetooth options and careful management can only take us so far. As long as there’s insulin and an imperfect way to measure and dose, all of us living with this condition will be on vigilant alert, cautiously guarding against the next time.

And preparing for the possibility that it might happen anyway.

I had one of those mornings last week.

Actually, it was more like one of those weeks last week.

Every time I came to work, it seemed like things were happening all around me, and my input or assistance was needed at every turn. Deadlines got tighter, and new requests made beating those deadlines harder than ever.

Then, on my way to work Friday, the subway broke down one stop from where I get off downtown. Convinced it was a fluke, and knowing I could do the extra walk (and I can use some extra walking, believe me), I decided against waiting for the next train.

I wound up walking an extra mile or so to get to the office. Of course, I never would have guessed that this would happen when I bolused for the breakfast I ate earlier. But it did, and understandably, my blood sugar tanked shortly after I arrived.

No worries… I always have juice and candy in my desk, so I was able to move on with my day. But, I started getting e-mails and phone calls and before I knew it, I was still at my desk working hard well after my usual lunch time.

Can you guess what happened next? Yes, my BG dropped again. I had to cut off a phone call early so I could walk away from my desk and get something to eat.

Many have said it… our lives with diabetes are great as long as nothing unexpected happens. But something unexpected always happens. Often, at the most inopportune time.

After all this time (26 years) living with diabetes, it’s easy to just shrug my shoulders at a day like this. But this is far more than a shruggable(?) circumstance. While experience is worth a lot on days like this, it’s easy to let experience tell us this is no big deal.

But it is a big deal. Or, perhaps, the fact that we make it look like it’s not a big deal is the big deal. I try not to remember what I’ve lost in time and effort in moments like these. However, it’s easy to tell myself that it’s time and effort I won’t get back anyway, so why bother worrying about it?

And that’s the point. So often, we make it look easy. We give the impression that it’s not hard to figure out, that everything just runs like clockwork.

It runs like clockwork because our lives, present and absent from diabetes, depend on the clockwork.

I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to go off the clock from my diabetes.

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.