Anjelica Huston, we have a problem.
"I feel low," he says.
"Are you sure?" I ask.
He shrugs his shoulders, his grey baseball mitt planted under his armpit.
"I don’t know, sort of."
I interrogate him.
"Do you feel funny? Tingly? Silly" Sweaty? Hungry?"
"I don’t know. A little. Maybe."
Charlie trots off into right field, still looking at me with a big question mark on his face and his palms raised upward. It's hard, but I let him go. Strange that I would I let him take the field when he kinda sorta feels low without testing his blood sugar.
I can't. I can't keep checking him. I checked him just minutes earlier when he said he felt low and he wasn’t and also checked him minutes before that when he said he felt low and he wasn't and Susanne checked him just before that!
What's been going on lately is not good.
If left to his own (diabetic) devices, Charlie would test his blood sugar about 47 times per day. If we had that new diabetes Nintendo DS video game that rewards users based on number of blood sugar checks, Charlie would be in a league of his own. It seems like what's happening is that he is associating every feeling in his body to a possible low. He's having low anxiety.
Now here's the tricky part. We've always taken his "I feel low" comments very seriously and have always tested him or have had him test himself. But when he seemingly feels low all day, what do you do? His poor fingers.Is he the boy who cried wolf or is he just a boy who no longer knows how he feels?
We continue to tell him that he must always tell us if he feels low, but now we're forced to question his judgment, which sends mixed signals.
It's become a problem at school as well. He walks down to the nurse several times throughout the day with false lows. He's missing classtime and must now bring more work home with him to catch up.
"Oh, Charlie," the nurse tells him, "you're a worrywart. You're OK."
She then sings "Don't Worry, Be Happy" and sends him on his way.
But we know all too well that the wolves are out there and they will come.
Riley went through a period where he kept saying he felt low and we'd check 4-5 times in an hour. But, usually, he was not low. It was right before an endo appointment and the doctor kind of talked sternly to us about testing too much. (Which is a ridiculous concept to me. Yes, it wreaks havoc on the fingers but if you could test too much, then why even have CGM? But, I digress). I calmly explained the reason we were testing so much was because Riley kept feeling low.
To end my story, after about a week of this, it stopped. I'm not sure if Riley was going through some weird growth spurt that made him feel differently or if he was just having blood sugar paranoia. Either way, it was not pleasant. On one hand you want him to know how serious it is being low and to take it seriously ever time. On the other hand, when you checked 10 minutes before and he was 210, why check again?
As someone with Type 1 diabetes, I can say that the actual "feeling" of normal anxiety (not related to diabetic lows) and the "feeling" of diabetic lows (not related to normal non-diabetic anxiety), those two feelings can indeed overlap to some degree, even when one or the other is not present.
Charlie may actually be having true (non-diabetic) anxiety appropriate to his age, where others in his age group also go through the same thing even though they may not have diabetes.
However, one thing I would keep in mind if I were in Charlie's diabetic situation is that with chronically elevated HbA1c levels, "normal" blood sugar levels actually feel like low blood sugar levels. This is very common; as even an endocrinologist may have a person's target blood sugar range over 200, at least at first, when that person has spent months or years above 200. Of course the goal would be to bring that target to a more realistic BG value over time, but not all of a sudden.
Because past blogs have stated Charlie's HbA1c is elevated (> 8.0), it may very well be that BG values less than 150, for instance, may cause Charlie to feel like he is low when in fact he is not.