Terrifyingly Low: How Low Can You Go?

Last night was one of the worst nights I have ever had.  Before I went to bed, my blood sugar was 66.  I drank 3 ounces of orange juice, which usually brings up my blood sugar quickly and went to bed.  My mom gets up multiple times in the middle of the night to test my blood sugar so that my sleep is not interrupted.  She can poke my finger, and I don’t even wake up, and if I have to drink juice, I often don’t remember the next morning.  I am so grateful for her and that she is willing to do this for me.

We decided that since I had juice she could test me 2 hours after we went to bed.  It was a shock for her to test me and see the meter show this:

Yes, the meter says 26 mg/dL.  A new record low for me.  I woke up to Mom yelling a few choice words at the meter.  We were both really scared.

Sometimes when my blood sugar drops between 45-60, I will wake up in the middle of the night feeling symptoms of low blood sugar.  I’ll be sweaty, shaky, have a fast heart rate, and feel like the room is spinning.  Occasionally I’ll wake up from a dream about low blood sugar and actually have low blood sugar.  I think part of what was so scary about last night was that I didn’t wake myself up with symptoms of low blood sugar.  Once I was awake, I felt very shaky, hungry, and kind of lightheaded.

To me, all low blood sugars are not the same.  I categorize them into how they make me feel and how scary they are:

• 50-70 mg/dL:  low blood sugar; I usually feel some sort of symptoms but this isn’t too bad
• mid 30s-49:  scary low blood sugar; this is when I start feeling really bad and usually need sleep to recover
• anything below mid 30s:  terrifyingly low; last night was the first time I have experienced this type of low; I felt exhausted and slept most of today, and the thoughts about what could happen with being this low are terrifying

Low blood sugar can cause a person to go into a coma and even cause death.  It is amazing to me that I was functioning at a level of 26.  But it brought up a lot of thoughts and feelings that I try to not think about and bury in the back of my mind.  Thoughts that will drive me crazy and make me depressed if I dwell on them.  What if Mom hadn’t tested my blood sugar when she had?  I doubt I would have waken up.  I think about “dead in bed syndrome,” which is when a young person with diabetes dies in their sleep.  There’s not an exact known cause of this syndrome, although it is suspected that the person has a low blood sugar episode that they don’t feel symptoms of, causing heart arrhythmia (irregular heartbeat) and death.  It makes me realize the gravity of having diabetes and that it could very well kill me.  It scares me that no matter how well I try to control diabetes, it seems to have a mind of its own.

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Don’t Ignore the Symptoms

About a month or two leading up to my diagnosis of type 1 diabetes, there were many things that I thought were somewhat strange but nothing that I ever thought would be life-threatening.  I was a young teen, preparing for high school and enjoying my increasing independence.  The extent of my diabetes knowledge was: 1) my grandma had type 2 diabetes and 2)  I couldn’t stand to watch her test her blood sugar.  I would not have been able to name any of the following symptoms:

Mikael Haggstrom / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain

I basically experienced every one of those symptoms.

• Excessively thirsty (polydipsia): I don’t really like water, and I suddenly was drinking multiple glasses a day. I would stand near the water fountains during recess because I couldn’t get enough.
• Excessive urination (polyuria):  I assumed this was just from drinking so much water.
• Lethargy:  I had little energy and was very tired.
• Breath (fruity smell):  Didn’t recognize this until the ER admitting nurse commented on it and asked me multiple times if I was diabetic.
• Hyperventilation:  The main reason I went to the ER.  Woke up in the middle of the night and had trouble breathing.
• Nausea:  I experienced this for at least 2 months.  I would feel nauseous after eating anything.  When I feel nauseous, I eat a peppermint and it usually helps.  It got to the point where it didn’t help, and I would eat 2-3, making me feel even worse.
• Vomiting:  The week before I was diagnosed, I couldn’t keep anything down.  I couldn’t even keep many fluids down.

Some of the symptoms I thought were strange, mainly my thirst and nausea, but I didn’t think much about it.  Some of the other symptoms, I thought were just a case of the flu. Without knowing the symptoms of diabetes, it wasn’t easy putting the pieces together.