Hey!  How IS everyone doing?  Did you have a great Christmas and a Happy New Year?  Is your new year off to a great start?  Mine is!  In case you didn’t receive the January issue of the DiabetesSisters Newsletter, REGISTRATION OPENED on January 1^st for the Weekend for Women Conference and spots are filling up quickly!  We have lots of diabetes all-stars lined up to share their knowledge about every subject related to being a female with diabetes!  Reserve your spot today because it is only open to the first 100 registrants! 

I would be remiss if I didn’t share a very frightening diabetes experience I had over the holiday season.  While I was in my hometown (Hickory, NC) visiting family my husband, daughter, and I stayed at my parent’s house.   I noticed that my blood sugars were pretty much all over the place for a few days prior to traveling to Hickory.  I changed my site on Tuesday night and when nothing changed by Wednesday evening, I started thinking, “I’ve got to do something about this!”  I started running through the list of possible causes.  I thought maybe the insulin I had been using was bad.  I checked my blood sugar and it was over 300 for the third time that day, so I took insulin using the bolus calculator on my pump.  I checked an hour later and it had only dropped about 20 points….further fueling the idea that my insulin was bad (=not as potent as normal).  I took more insulin and checked it again about an hour later.  It still hadn’t fallen very much and I was frustrated and sleepy.  So, I decided to go on to bed and deal with it the next day. 

My husband was still awake watching television when I awoke around 12:30am, checked my blood sugar (it was somewhere in the 50 range) and got something to eat.  I sat on the bed watching tv for a bit after I ate.  Then, all of the sudden, my heart started beating really fast and I felt a sense of panic (fight or flight response).  My husband said that I said, “Something’s not right” and proceeded to try to get out of the bed.  He recognized that I was in trouble and pulled me back down on the bed.  At that point, I passed out.  I remember him saying, “Stay with me, Brandy!   Stay with me!” in what seemed to be a very far away, panicked voice.  He said he smacked me a few times to wake me and I looked at him, then closed my eyes again.  He thought quickly and grabbed a few Hershey’s kisses that were lying on the nightstand as I opened my eyes again.  He tried to put them in my mouth, but I kept fighting spitting them out.  I went in and out of consciousness for a bit and I remember feeling my tongue curling up in my mouth and me not being able to stop it.    Then, he pried open my mouth and began rubbing the chocolate all over my tongue.  I remember him saying, “Swallow Brandy.”  In what seemed like an eternity to my husband (but was probably less than a minute) I began to look around the room.  My husband was sitting on the bed in front of me, staring at me, and I noticed his forehead was drenched in sweat.  He said, “You scared the HELL out of me!”  to which I replied, “Heh…I scared the HELL out me!”   After a period quiet solitude for both of us to "get our senses back", my husband and I started trying to figure out what had gone wrong.  I was still convinced that something was wrong with my insulin, so I reduced my overnight bolus rates because I was scared of having another low blood sugar in the middle of the night.  I decided that I would go buy a new bottle of insulin in the morning. 

The next morning, I got up and checked my blood sugar and, of course, it was high.  But, then I noticed something.  The code on the side of the strips was 25.  My meter had been set at 17 for a long time.  I stuck a strip in my meter and waited for it to come on.  Sure enough…it said, “Code 17.”  Aha!  Is that what was wrong?  Could that simple mistake have caused such a huge problem?  I checked my blood sugar again with the correct code and….it was in target range!  Mystery solved!  While I was glad to have the mystery solved, I began reflecting on what an important lesson I learned about the importance of checking the code on your test strips!!!