Diabetic Recipes
douglas
Since I can remember, I've always had certain symptoms of being low. A funny feeling in my stomach, shaking, cold sweats, feeling tired, slow or incomplete thoughts. Depending on the low, sometimes certain symptoms would be worse than others. Almost every single time, I got this feeling in my stomach kind of like butterflies. Lately, I've been having some of these low symptoms when my blood sugar is not even close to a low. I get the feeling in my stomach, I feel shaky, I even start slurring my words. I check and I'm fine. 141. 126. Even 204. So why do I feel low?
I've heard of hypoglycemia unawareness (which for the past two years I've struggled with) where you get low and don't feel any symptoms. This happened just the other day. I felt fine, as if I could have run a mile. I decided to check since feeling fine seems to be very rare these days. 51. Definitely not a number I want to see when I feel like running a mile. Hypoglycemia unawareness seems inevitable after fifteen years of diabetes and numerous lows (often in the same day). Is there such a thing as hypoglycemia OVER awareness?
Maybe the slightest drop in my blood sugar is causing me to feel that funny feeling. Maybe it's just a feeling that every human gets and I only relate it to lows. Maybe it's because of other health issues. Maybe after years of running in the two and three hundreds, I've made my body think anything below that is low. Maybe it's the after effect of lows in the last few days. Maybe it's just something I need to get used to.
It doesn't seem like I can get used to it though. I can't ignore it because I do get low and have the symptoms. I can't possibly check every time I get this feeling (especially since it might last for hours). My poor fingers will fall off. Plus it's very distracting never knowing where my blood sugar might be when I feel this way. I'm really at a loss as to what to do. Is this just a part of diabetes life? As we age in our diabetes years, we lose our low awareness and gain low over awareness? Sounds crummy either way.
Could you be *going* low and that's the feeling you get?
I've had T1 for nearly 21 years and have just started experiencing this regularly in the past few weeks. I have been wondering if I'm feeling my BG as it is dropping, instead of after it's hit bottom. I've been trying to keep track of when I have these feelings to see if there's a downward trend afterward, but haven't found any substantial evidence yet. Let me know if you figure it out!
When someone asks how I know when I'm low, I always have a hard time describing "that" feeling in my stomach...glad to see it's not just me having it though :)
Lindsey,
Welcome back! If you've been running high for a while, then your body will think you are low when you go below what your body has been used to.
My biggest low symptom is what I call "fuzzy head". That's the only way I can describe it!
Tracy
Oddly enough, in the last week I have been struggling with the same issue. Like you, I've been feeling low, but testing fine(between 5-8 in Canada, which I think is near your 100ish range). I also thought that maybe its related to the frequent lows I do feel but really, I have no idea ... in some ways I feel like I'm being betrayed by my body but don't know what to do, other then test, test and test (just in case). I do agree with you, it's crummy!!
michko- sometimes i notice i'm dropping but the majority of the time i'm pretty stable.
mathvxn- it's hard to describe lows especially since every person is so different. so weird that this is happening to more than me.
tracy- thanks!! i don't feel like i've been running high for awhile before the majority of these feelings...i'm going to look into that!
constant- it is kind of like a betrayal by your body especially since we diabetics rely on those symptoms so regularly. i felt that way when i started having the unawareness thing, it was frustrating. now this makes it even more crummy!!
everyone- i'm going to do some research to see if i can find anything like this and i'll post if i find anything!
I've had the same thing happen a few times, for me it seems to happen when I've been running high for a few days - I get low symptoms when I'm not actually low, just dropping. Sometimes, I'm not even dropping - just hungry. It's funny how many of my low symptoms are also symptoms of hunger, and how I always have such a hard time believing that's all it is!
Wearing a CGMS full-time has really helped me catch a most of my lows before they happen, and has really helped reverse my hypo unawareness. Have you considered using a CGMS? Once I made peace with wearing my pump (which took a while), it didn't really bother me to add a sensor too.
There are a couple of things I'd want to try ruling out: stress (any sort of stress, like upcoming exams, periods of unemployment, periods of financial stress or relationship stress, etc. can make your "average" run high for an extended period of time); hunger (how long had it been since you'd eaten? how much had you eaten?); thirst/hydration (some folk claim one often feels hunger and/or low when one is merely dehydrated).
Also, I'd start calibrating an easily-accessible alternate site, such as the forearm. Factors such as heat, cold, persistent food ingredients, etc. will give me unreliable fingertip readings, so if my fingertip reads "off", I'll double-check against my forearm. Or if I know in advance my fingertip reading is likely to be "off", I'll go straight for the forearm.
i do the same thing. my sugar level before my pump was in the 700's and when i got the pump and it started to drop to normal i felt realy bad. but now i will start to get those same symptoms and i will check my sugar and it will be like 200 or something. and i have noticed also that when i do drop really low sometimes i dont have any symptoms at all. it really does suck.
i don't run high as a norm, but i have been fighting thes "lows" lately also. Like this morning, I had breakfast with my Aunt and even before we started eating, i felt like my sugar was sinking. tested my sugar, 174, or, but halfway through breakfast i started feeling worse, checked it again, 173. ok, i'm going crazy. about 45 muinutes later got back to her house checked it again 167. help, i feel like i'm going nuts. i have ckecked on my fingers and on my arms, no difference, just sometimes i bruse and look like a junky. :~)
ldavila- you're not going nuts!!! obviously, many of us on here seem to have this issue. just keep checking, so far i can't figure out why this is happening to us. by the way, are you from texas? i am noticing a pattern...as far as i can tell it's mostly women that have responded saying they have this issue. i've never looked for the correlation, but ladies...could this be related to our cycles?
Lindsey,
I'm not from Texas, I'm from Kansas abut now living in Arkansas for about a year to be near my daughters and there families, especially my grand-kids. The lows are still haunting me but I don't have to worry about cycles any more-yeah-I wonder why it happens mainly to women? Thanks for the support-Linda Davila