The blood sugar forces were not with me yesterday as I dropped to a 59 mg/dl after class.

I have hypoglycemia or low blood glucose unawareness, so I did not realize that I was low until I was trying to write daily facts on Facebook for Diabetes Awareness month. While looking around the online community, it appears that something was in the air yesterday, as so many members of the diabetes community were struggling with low blood glucose levels.

It is so nice to have a community with whom I can talk about these issues, and who will understand what a low blood glucose level feels like – that brain fog, fuzziness and inability to concentrate. I’m just thankful that my body waited until after class to pull a low blood glucose, especially since I’ve recently been out of class for so long due to the surgery that I had in October.   I think that the most frustrating thing about hypoglycemic episodes (low blood glucose episodes) or the swings to hyperglycemic episodes (high blood glucose episodes) is the fact that my body just doesn’t feel either the lows or the highs until I’m at extremes on both ends of the range. That is not a good thing. I now have a CGM (continuous glucose monitor), and I use both the Minimed Revel pump with the integrated  Real-Time CGM. The one thing that I really strongly dislike about the CGM is that during the first day while you are calibrating, you don’t get any alarms for high or low blood glucose levels. So, of course, yesterday was day 1 for my CGM sensor, so I did not get any alarms to let me know that my blood glucose was starting to go low or that my blood glucose was low. That would have saved me a lot of trouble and headache, literally, later on in the day yesterday. After I treated my low with the appropriate amount of carbohydrate (a mixture of Smarties, which I always have on hand as an alternative to glucose tablets (they are cheaper and they do the same job, plus they taste better!) and some Pixie Stix that we had left in the bowl of candy that we gave out on Halloween), saw that my glucose level was 80 mg/dl, ate some peanut butter crackers, and then I fell asleep – at 6 p.m. My mom came to wake me up to get me to eat some dinner, and it was 9 p.m. before I woke up well enough to eat. Hypoglycemic episodes tire me out more than almost anything else! It takes so much energy when I have blood glucose swings, and leaves me feeling like I have run a marathon. Despite my best efforts with a decreased basal rate (background insulin) of 50% to try to avoid another low and only giving half of the bolus for my dinner, I still woke up at 3 a.m. at 63 mg/dl.  It is just another day in the life, riding the diabetes glucocoaster! I’d love a ticket off of this ride, but for now, I’m trying to live as positively and as best as I can!  

In Sisterhood,

Aliza Chana