Tag Archives: lows

Recognize your inner superhero.

June 6, 2014 – 9:27 am

Is it the warm weather, or is it just that I’m getting older? I’ve recently experienced a couple of lows that were just energy-zapping. Those “I see it coming, here it is, I don’t want to move, now I need to move, and eat a bunch of stuff/drink juice/inhale glucose tabs” lows. Then, when it’s over, I experience the “I’m so tired I just want to curl up in the corner where the sun is shining through and sleep for about ten hours” hangover.

That’s what it feels like too… like a hangover. Knocked on your butt, your body is punishing you for too much insulin. Or too much exercise. Or not enough carbs. Or because your body has a history of punishing you, and every now and then it wants to assert its authority for no bloody reason at all.

That’s when we become heroes. Doesn’t make sense, does it? But think about it.

We find ourselves in a dangerous situation. Life-threatening, even. A crisis all our own, like our human body has encountered its own kryptonite. Things might be touch-and-go for a little while. But we fight back. We use whatever means at our disposal to drive the enemy away. We MacGyver solutions, we will ourselves to persevere.

And then we go right back to our regularly scheduled lives.

Hopefully, this little scenario doesn’t play out too often in your life. When it does, and you overcome, don’t forget that you are a force of nature. Diabetes cannot stop you, and you are living proof. In fact, diabetes has tried to stop you, and you didn’t let it.

It’s not in your most recent hypoglycemic episode. It’s not in your last hemoglobin A1c. It is evident in the life you lead, the job you perform, the people and organizations you help succeed, in the family and friends that surround you, and the simple fact that you are still here.

I see you. I read about you. I live with the same disease you do. Trust me when I say that when you overcome those lows, you are succeeding at something that would humble even the most confident of individuals. I recognize that about you. I hope you recognize that about yourself.

By the way, you might want to check yourself in the mirror. I thought I saw a little of your superhero cape showing in the back.
 
 
 

By StephenS | Posted in Lows | Also tagged , , | Comments (4)

Weird middle-of-the-day low.

November 25, 2013 – 9:22 am

On Friday, Mike Hoskins over at Diabetes Mine wrote about how hypoglycemia (low blood glucose) feels to him. If you have diabetes, you have your own experiences with hypoglycemia. Nearly everyone’s reaction is different. I almost left a response after reading Mike’s post, but I thought I would write about it here instead.

This is a case where pre-bolusing didn’t work for me.

Friday morning, I was in a hurry to get to work, and I ran out the door without preparing my lunch. This isn’t something I do very often; only about 8 or 10 times per year, I’d guess. Anyway, to save time, I ran out the door with the expectation that I would just grab lunch at a local deli near where I work downtown.

So lunchtime comes, and my BG reading says 82 mg/dL. Not too bad, right? I know I’m buying out for lunch, and that usually comes with more carbs than my normal lunch. Hence the pre-bolus. I knew what I was going to order, and I bloused for it as I was headed downstairs.

I got downstairs and walked the two blocks to the deli, ordered a grilled ham and cheese and a bag of chips to go (this is why I don’t eat out for lunch often). I got my order and started walking with it back to the building where I work. So far, so good.

But when I got back to work, the fire alarms were sounding and I was told I couldn’t go back into the building.

Now I start to worry. I’m worried because I know hypoglycemia is either here or close. And immediately, I started to form contingency plans in my head:

– What if I can’t get back into the building in the next few minutes?

– What if I’m expected to walk down the street and gather with my co-workers at our assigned evacuation spot?

– What will my co-workers think of me if I start gobbling down my lunch in front of a potentially serious gathering of hundreds?

– What if my glucose gets too low before I can figure all this out?

– What if it’s some other kind of emergency and my co-workers are stuck inside while I’m stuck outside? Now I’m concerned about them. How can I help?

To answer these questions, my mind started racing through all kinds of potential scenarios. Sometimes when I’m low, this type of thing races through my head like wildfire in a pine forest. My mind knows that I’m supposed to eat, eat, eat. But that part of my instinct was trying to be squashed by something that almost borders on paranoia.

After a couple of minutes of waiting, but what really seemed like half an hour or so, the alarms were turned off and I was able to get back into the building and enjoy my lunch. A weird middle of the day, for sure.

What does this episode tell me? It tells me that I need to do a little self-examination, and see if I can come up with ways to trigger my brain to eat in those circumstances rather than worry about anything else. For me, I know that hypoglycemia sometimes impairs my judgement. But if I can focus on something, anything that helps me remember what I have to do even while mind games are going on inside my head, I’ll be all right.

In the meantime, you better believe I packed my lunch today.
 
 
 

By StephenS | Posted in Lows | Also tagged , | Comments (2)

Post-mortem on Monday morning’s low.

April 24, 2013 – 11:00 am

I really wrestled with whether I should write again about my severe low early Monday morning. In the end, I’m writing this wrap-up because when something like this occurs, it’s important that I (and The Great Spousal Unit) examine what happened, and if I can, do something about it. Only then can I move on.

So here are some bullet points on Monday morning’s hypo event:
 
 
– First of all, many thank yous to everyone who left a comment here or on Facebook. I appreciate the fact that you were so concerned for my well being. Even when I’m making stupid mistakes. Read on…

– Looking back at my pump, I saw the most obvious problem… I bolused twice for dinner. Once before dinner (which I forgot about), and about an hour later. I remember thinking that I hadn’t bolused, and like an idiot, I didn’t check my pump and bolused again. Plus, my glucose was really climbing at that point, and I was very concerned after being high in the afternoon. On top of that, I bolused for a snack about an hour and a half after dinner. So yeah, I seriously stacked my boluses. I won’t ever bolus again without double-checking the pump first. I’m feeling really, really stupid about this. Really, there’s just no excuse.

– I was fighting really high BGs all day Sunday (in the 300s), with the breaks from that only coming just before meals. The morning spike was probably due to a high carb breakfast. I had a low carb lunch, but later found tubing that was clamped off by my pump’s belt clip. I changed the tubing, and worked on fighting the highs off the rest of the day. I was sinking pretty good before dinner, then had another large post-prandial spike an hour later. When I went to bed, I was still at something like 218 mg/dL, but I really had way too much insulin on board at that point.

– I slept through all of the Dexcom alarms. Or, I slept through turning them off. I don’t know. I do know I remember one alarm early on (probably around 1:00) that I heard. I turned it off, ate a few Glucolift tabs, and went back to sleep (I know, I didn’t check the BG). I don’t recall hearing another alarm. Maureen sleeps next to me, and she doesn’t recall hearing an alarm either. But she was sleeping as soundly as I was.

– Speaking of the Dexcom… I’m getting some very useful data on how my glucose trends through the day. That’s the good news. The bad news is that I’m obsessing over it too much. I don’t want to say I’m treating solely based on what I’m seeing on the receiver’s display. I’m not sure I’m ready to be honest with myself about that. But Maureen mentioned just today that I “need to stop paying so much attention to that thing”.

– I have a nice bruise on the side of my head, and a cut on my ear. Probably from falling out of bed, but I really don’t know. I guess I should be happy that’s all the physical reminders I have from this.
 
 
The final analysis: It was an epic fail on my part. I cowboyed my way through the day instead of being patient.

Many times, I’ve commented on blogs and told people in person that you can’t worry about the past. It’s only a reference point. What counts is making the most out of today and tomorrow.

Now I have to go practice what I’ve been preaching.
 
 
 

By StephenS | Posted in Lows | Also tagged , | Comments (3)

Sometimes the highs are worth it.

March 11, 2013 – 10:39 am

I have a lot to talk about this week. But first, I need to get this thing out of my head from yesterday. It’s about a low. One of those nasty, thrashing around, call 911 hypoglycemic events that we all hate to think about. Or talk about. I’m fine, no real harm done, and the EMS people were only at the house for about five minutes because I’m always better by the time they get there anyway, though the thing I hate most about those times (which have been very infrequent) is that they have to be there at all instead of being out helping someone who really needs to be helped.

The thing about the situation yesterday is that it could have been avoided. There are two ways that I could have avoided such a low. And I have a real point to make at the end, I mean it.

The first: I should lay the groundwork here by saying it was around five o’clock, it was already a full day, with a warm afternoon which included my first outdoor bike ride of the year and catching up on cleaning the kitchen within an inch of its life, cleaning the bathroom within an inch of its life, and doing the laundry. I had just come up from the basement after switching over the laundry for the third time, and Maureen said “Whoa, slow down, come sit down, you look pale”. I could feel myself getting low downstairs, and I took an extra couple of minutes (7? 8? 10? Who knows?) to finish everything down there before going back upstairs. You can see where this is going, yes? So I knew I was low when I came up. But I sat down anyway without getting anything or even grabbing my meter. Maureen is like, “You look low… I’m getting some juice and something to eat”. I told her not to, I have a tube of Glucolift tabs in my pocket, and if she could, please get my meter. I didn’t want to overtreat and kill my appetite for what was shaping up to be a nice Sunday dinner. I wanted to know where my BG was so I could ingest an appropriate amount to get back up to an appropriate range.

So in about two seconds (she’s superhero fast like that) she brings me juice, honey, and my meter. “Here, drink this before you test”. “No, I want to test first”. “No, drink this first”. I had to move her hand away from trying to hand me juice while I tried to get a drop of blood to my test strip. And now, with my brain turning to mush, each attempt by her, each word by her, meant that I had to start at zero again and concentrate from the beginning to inch my way toward that strip. And in the end, that drop of blood never made it there, and the meter, myself, and Maureen all made it onto the floor.

If I would have been left alone for just a few seconds, I probably (probably…) would have gotten that reading and then started treating right away.

The second reason: Of course, the worst could have been avoided if I would have just obeyed orders and immediately started drinking juice and eating honey. And popping Glucolifts like they were candy (they do taste like candy, I confess). But I didn’t. And that’s what brings me to the crux of this post.

Here’s what I learned from this experience: Sure, if I would have been on my own, I probably would have tested first, and I’m pretty sure everything would have been okay and there would have been no need for EMS intervention or anything like that.

But the thing is, I wasn’t by myself. There were two people in this scenario, and other than physically, the other person was affected just as much or more than I was by the whole episode. People With Diabetes: Do you think that the other people in your life aren’t affected at all by what you go through? Do you think that they don’t feel for you at these moments? Do you understand that they feel responsible, sometimes guilty for not helping you enough? If I can help it, I do not want to be responsible for heaping more on my loved ones than they already have to endure.

What I learned from this is that sometimes, it’s just better to risk overtreating and suffer the high BG later in order to save your loved ones the unbearable and unnecessary grief, guilt, and fear of the next time. Holy crap, I would give anything to erase that now. Including a little bump in my A1c or a CGM graph or a downward-carb modified dinner.
 
 
 

By StephenS | Posted in Lows | Also tagged , , , | Comments (7)

There should be stoppage time.

February 25, 2013 – 9:17 am

There’s not really a lot that depresses me about diabetes. Okay, there’s a lot that could depress me about diabetes. But I’m the kind of person that would let those things really get me down if I let them. So often, I choose not to think of them. Very often, I choose not to think of them, if you know what I mean. It’s one of the few parts of my life where I try to remain positive at all times.

But every once in a while… well, you just have to let yourself rant.

I was working around the house Saturday afternoon, cleaning, doing the laundry, that kind of thing. At some point, I went upstairs to make the bed that had been left unmade since morning. I had a couple of other things to do up there too, so I took the iPad with me and started up the Pandora® so I’d have some music while I worked.

Some 45 minutes later, the bed was only half made, and I was sucking back juice and honey. A bright 43 mg/dL showed on my meter.

Hey, as much as we would like them not to, these things happen. But where was my brain during this time? What happened to those 45 minutes? I have a right to ask… I’ll never get those 45 minutes back, and I feel cheated somehow. For three quarters of an hour, my brain was jello. It let me down.

Then I had to explain it to everyone in the house, and answer the questions like: “Did you know you were going low?” “Did you bolus too much at lunch?” “Why didn’t you get some juice sooner?”

The answer to all of those questions is, I DON’T KNOW. My brain checked out for that time. I have almost no recollection of anything other than fidgeting too much with the sheets and blankets and pillows on the bed, and walking around the bedroom what seemed like a hundred times. I don’t have an explanation for any of that either.

But I want my 45 minutes back. I feel like someone, something, some cosmic timekeeper, owes me 45 minutes extra. Stoppage time, they call it in soccer. I want my time back! At the end of my life, there should be a lot of stoppage time left over.

If, somehow, I ever do get my time back… trust me, I’m going to make very good use of it. What would you do with your extra stoppage time?
 
 
 

By StephenS | Posted in Lows | Also tagged , , | Comments (5)