@PerfectHorse, you’re a writer… you must be. Either you are an amazing writer, or I’ve experienced that exact crash a million times because I could feel it.
But… when you explain it like that, it does make me wonder how many poor misunderstood adolescents, sitting in the car alone (or with friends) for an extended period of time, surrounded by tacos, and upside down in their seats, I’ve unfairly assumed were smoking something. Poor things. And they were just low… and not high. 
I joke.
Okay, @elver, before I try to figure out what you just said, need to know… Are you on a bunch of pain medicine, or did you mean to ask me black.and.white.fractal.images?
And am I allowed to ask you in here how everything went??
Ask away, yes on the meds, but still oddly lucid (I have an insanely high tolerance to pain meds and. Anesthesia). Doc says it went, well. Time will tell.
Fractal images I think are visual.expressions of mathematical equations (somebody pls correct me if I borked this explaination). Regardless, like sugar skulls they kind.of.speak to me in a center of my core kind of way. B&W fractals are the closest representations of what I see besides floaters and.a.narrowing field of vision before I take a Dixie. Beautiful and scary. Ying and Yang
We have this conversation every few days. Like two hours ago actually. And I’m always the one that feels dumb - because by now I should know that EH can’t process it when he’s low. Prior to having a CGM, he used to try to do math in his head. If he couldn’t add up to numbers quickly, he knew that he was low and would test his blood sugar. It worked every time.
I’m also going to add, for @Nickyghaleb and @T1Allison’s benefits, that whether the symptoms are either emotional or physical, they certainly seem very valid. And I feel very happy that Nicky came up with a solution to feel better! That waiting game as an outsider/not T1 is so hard when it comes to waiting for the BG to go up. Maybe I should close my eyes? 
Now having read @Eric’s statement I’m afraid for anybody to close their eyes. But, if you have ingested a bunch of sugar, and you know that it is going to work, I suppose riding it out is the next step?
Multiple questions occur to one …
And yes, the desire to sleep isn’t uncommon. Serious lows can be draining. I’m more curious why a person with a CGM is having such serious lows with such regularity. I mean, isn’t a primary point of a CGM to alert you that you’re heading low before you’re low?
One benefit of my yoga teacher training is that I now use yoga breathing practices through the (sometimes long) wait for my BG to come back up. I am a good bit calmer yet alert in case I need to get more carbs in quickly. Thank goodness (knock wood) I haven’t had one of those lows in a while.
ETA 1/31: Gah, had one tonight! (Breathe in, breathe out, repeat…) Messed up my post-exercise bolus and meal in a big way, sigh…
Late in reading this, but great post, Nicky. The sensory overload sensations you describe occur with my lows, sometimes (usually when at home, with lots of competing voices, music playing, etc). It’s taken me some years to realize this…or maybe it is a change in low symptoms over time.
I too, have had the visual disturbances with certain lows. Not very much fun, especially since they remind me of migraines with aura, which I’ve also experienced (thankfully less frequently in recent years).
@Bill brought up low symptoms changing over time…I’ve definitely noticed this. I posted most of my typical low symptoms in another thread, many of which weren’t exactly textbook low BG symptoms.
Maybe we ought to have a sticky with low symptoms as reported by members? Or maybe this already exists?
I think I’m happy that I barely feel most of my lows. I mean…it’s not good, but it beats feeling them all full-force.
With more severe lows, I’ve gotten the sensory-overload feeling. Everything seems to bright and too loud and too chaotic. Usually at that point I get panicky because it makes me feel like I’m close to passing out.
I’ve also gotten the vision obscured symptom. The last time I had that i was walking downtown and couldn’t see anything around me. It was terrifying because, again, I couldn’t think and couldnt’ see and could barely walk and felt close to passing out.
The other symptom I get that really bothers me is my tongue or mouth or nose goes numb. That freaks me out and sometimes lasts quite a while even after my blood sugar has started to rise.
I think all of these symptoms are caused by my brain malfunctioning due to lack of glucose.
Otherwise, lows for me are generally just feeling a little weak, maybe not able to concentrate as well, a bit of a decline in fine motor skills. I don’t get the shaking or sweating and am able to think just fine. But having said that, my course of action is always to take 4-6 glucose tablets. If I go high later, I’ll deal with it.
I sometimes wonder the same thing when I see someone that doesn’t look like they are all there. These days I’m more inclined to ask if they are okay (even with all the heroine running around my hometown). It doesn’t happen often, mostly it’s a gut feeling that I might be able to help. To my surprise, it was once a T1D experiencing a low. I gladly handed over the candy in my purse. There but for the grace of God go I…but I digress.
Thank you for the compliment. I often blog about my kittehs and their stories on my FB page and have been told I should write books. If only I could slow down the rotation of the earth and create 37 hour days so I could do that on top of everything else AND get more sleep! Imagine what THAT would do to my sugar!! LoL. 
Yeah…I see everything as big, bulbous cartoon figures, kind of like in Roger Rabbit’s Cartoontown. And the colors are too bright.
All the feels…
Ugh, kinda like a migraine… 
Sorry so slow to respond. I wanted to respond as soon as I saw this, but my husband was going to throw something at me if I didn’t put the phone down and help pack something. 
(I hope I didn’t offend any 14 year olds with that).1.5. As far as that being a mega-weird crash, I do those on a regular basis. Before I chalk it up to a freaky expression of my diabetes, I’ll assume it’s a consequence of that poor behavior I mentioned up there. Too busy for my own diabetes. Like diabetes is going to wait until I’m ready.
Excellent idea, and to be honest, probably some of them are. I never got around to finishing up what I wanted to say about IV on that other thread, but I will tell you I’m very careful and very conservative with it. I am those things because I learned very quickly that it’s not the same kind of shot. For that reason, that’s not really where I’m seeing this. The IM shots… again, probably. All around I’ve gotten more aggressive with my insulin, and this is par for the course. So, yes, that’s a possibility as well. The biggest problem area for me though, and this is more a general period than a specific injection, is the couple of hours after exercise. Many of these crashes occur maybe an hour and a half or two hours after completion of a difficult workout. The problem is that I sometimes attack a real (or perceived) post-workout spike with a lot of insulin. Sometimes I needed every bit of it. Sometimes it sends me over the cliff. I do think most of these episodes are simply a classic example of insulin stacking. I’ve just finished an hour workout, I’ve done 2 units to cover missed basal, 1.5 to cover the carbs I’m going to eat, but now I’m watching my BG climb to a 225. I get frustrated, and I give it insulin. It’s not always wrong, but if I then forget to have the banana I bolused for, or my kids need something right as I feel my blood sugar starting to drop, but I’m too busy to catch it… You see where I’m going. It’s a six course meal of bad behaviors, and I pay for it with the crashes.
My sensors are just no good for alerting me of a big crash or a big spike before I’ve reached it. That’s just no excuse though because between CGM and the 1,000 available clues, I could probably head off many of them just by acting at the right time.
Omgoodness. I completely relate. I feel as if my brain doesn’t have enough fuel so it shuts down or consolidates one of your senses. Hate it when it’s sight. I guess it keeps the most important ones going with whatever fuel is left in that brain!! I always try to get the sensory input down so I don’t feel it so much.
Yes. This is exactly what I mentioned to @Beacher. I think this period can leave me a little vulnerable. My guess is I’m a little more susceptible to lows after many sessions anyway, but when I mix in a poorly calculated bolus, which I can do on a professional level, I think it can set me up for a big, hard, fast crash. A triple decker. 
Breathing though— that’s another great idea. I’ve been doing okay on the crashes since I posted this with the exception of a couple of smaller ones where I did close my eyes, so I haven’t had too much of a chance to see what plays out. But this talk of falling asleep is coming through loud and clear, and something like breathing might be a good, natural answer.
How many carbs do you get after a hard workout?
I try to eat a banana every time… then after that kind of depends on the workout. Sometimes I’m too high for carbs. Sometimes I can’t get enough of them.
After every hard workout, 4 things:
Carbs, insulin, water, and protein
Make that a habit. Every time.
If you are high, take more insulin so you can take the carbs. If you are low, take more carbs.
I know it’s overly simplified. But the basic gist is that you need those things after the hard workouts.
Okay. I’ve got the water covered, and the insulin… and the protein.
Competing voices. I recently have realized that my senses are particularly vulnerable during these lows, and that it really is not a mood thing as much as it is an overload, but the voices definitely pack a bigger punch. In my case, those voices are my children’s, husband’s, and mom’s, and there’s just so much demand, need, and concern in them that it can make it harder on me to focus. Too many things competing for my temporary diminished processing ability. I think that’s one way to look at… that one kind of crash. Once I figure that one out, it can be on to the all the rest of them.
Don’t know what a sticky is… Is that different than a thread??