Everything seems to be all over the place lately. Despite catching up on school work and actually de-stressing this week, my blood sugars are bouncing like rubber balls in an airplane bin. My averages are up, yet I'm having rashes of severe lows. And by severe, I don't mean symptoms. I mean numbers and hypoglycemic unawareness.
Like last Thursday night, I cooked chili for a friend. Ate a giant bowl with cornbread, bolused for what I expected was way too little, and went on my way. Only to feel an urge to test a few hours later. No symptoms, just something in my brain saying that I should bite the bullet to test. And that urging left me staring at a 37. How?
Tuesday night, I saw the same thing. A normal dinner, a normal bolus, and a few hours later...33. With no symptoms again, just that same urgent need to test, to confirm. And at that point, I decided the CGMS needed to be hooked back up. Seeing numbers in the 30's at such late hours, I won't risk going to sleep in that range...and not waking up.
Wednesday afternoon was about the same ordeal. My blood sugars had been elevated in the morning (the usual post-breakfast thing). I'm behind on sleep and still fairly fatigued between the leg infection and changing my medications this month, so I took a late afternoon nap before my next class. I woke up, still groggy but feeling okay. I put away some laundry. And got that same "something isn't right" kind of feeling. Sure enough, 38 on the meter screen.
Unfortunately for that one, I hadn't had time to replace the CGMS battery so I wasn't hooked up to catch it. This whole no symptoms thing is really ticking me off. I know I run low. I know that hypoglycemic unawareness is fairly common for me. But these types of lows have never been THIS common at THIS range. Forties and fifties are my comfort zone, the usual places that I end up. But the thirties...this is new territory.
The annoying thing is that between the 30's and other random lows, I'm not running on an even keel at other times. The weekend left me with averages in the 200 when my infection peaked and got the best of my blood sugars. And the two weeks before had been a mix of few blood sugar checks, busy schedules, and odd food choices. On top of that, I haven't worked out but maybe two times in the last two weeks, none of those paralleling to the lows. Needless to say, my averages were creeping up.
Maybe it's the lack of schedule or the subconscious stress of school and health. Or maybe it's just one of those weeks where patterns fail me and lows stalk me. Whatever the cause is, I'd like to just head back into the 50 range. No more 30's for me, please!
At least now I'm connected to the CGMS again, waiting for the next week of blood sugars to give me some semblance of patterns. But even without patterns, I feel a little safer knowing that I can see some sort of trend over the last few hours and spot the signs of another low. And hopefully that tidbit of information will get me better prepared for my upcoming endo appointment as well; at least I'm feeling more proactive this way.
