So I’m having a scary night. I don’t know what at all caused it! Keep in mind I only have a meter and I do insulin pens , I’m on Basaglar (lantus) and Admelog (humalog)…starting to think maybe I should ask my doc to refer me to an endo so maybe I can have someone fight for me to get a libre or dexcom so I can see what is trending here…because I literally have no idea why it’s like this and I’m pretty sure I’m testing enough???
Felt weird, tested my blood sugar (thank goodness I did)…34 mg/dL!!! I’ve NEVER been that low in my life and it’s so scary. So I took at least 6 glucose tablets. I got up to 53 mg/dL so far, still treating it and popping glucose tablets, testing ever 15 minutes or so (hard to keep track I’m so scared) , hoping it’ll get up soon. I’m SO SWEATY! My hair and clothes are completely soaked in sweat and my laptop’s like sticking to me. I’m unsure if I injected my basaglar wrong…somehow… or what the heck is going on? My last admelog dose was like early this afternoon with lunch. I haven’t taken any fast acting since then and I’ve been nibbling on low carb stuff for the past few hours just because I’ve not been hungry enough for a meal but want a snack. Had a protein bar and some other very little snacks but nothing heavy, but they did have carbs. I was 113 about 3 hours ago, but now I’m down to this low??? What the heck is going on??? Like did I inject my basaglar into a muscle or vein? Is it because I bragged about not having lantus lows FOR ALL THIS TIME? Because I never have before afaik? (I so far can pretty much link every previous hypo I’ve had in my life to too much fast acting or being npo in the hospital with weird insulin regimens ) Is it because I bragged about not having many if any hypos this year? I think I only had one in march this is like prolly my 2nd hypo in the entire year.
Worst part is it’s night time, idk how I’m gonna sleep at night worrying about this. My fiance’s almost home from work and can help me tonight at least if anything , but I’m really scared.
Badly injected basaglar like it went somewhere other than it should of like a vein or muscle and decided to act like afrezza on crack. I swear to god though , I’ve injected lantus/basaglar into my thighs (both of them) for like all 5 years and it’s my main site for that (sometimes arms or butt if I feel like I need to give them a break though) and it’s never done this before.
I’m taking too much, which would be a possibility…I have noticed slightly lower than I usually get pre-meal numbers (like 70something to low 80’s, when for most the year I’ve maintained some sort of 90-ish pre-meal number for a while) and having very occasional lower than average random numbers like 70’s out of nowhere but not actual lows.
Weird possibility that the multivitamin I started taking a while back is affecting things. It’s the only new thing I have going on. It’s just some gummy vitamin and it has d3 in it and it’s one of the few vegetarian ones and I thought, since I work nights , it’s cold and dark a lot now ,and don’t see the sun a lot it’d be good to take some d3, got the multi simply because it also has b12 and I thought that’d give me more in the day time energy without drinking an energy drink for caffeine or something …but idk. Weird possibility but that’s one of the only changes I can think of…besides…
I’m trying Relion pen needles now and this may be relevant to the last point of 3 and the entire part of 1…but they’re not as comfortable as the BD ones and I feel like maybe??? they’re throwing off my injection technique as they seem big for 4 mm needles that are as thin as the bd ones. I might just put the rest of these needles aside and get the bd one I got out , as I have a brand new 100 box of the bd ones I got like a few weeks after buying the relion one, just started the relion ones too despite that.
I have been that low and indeed it feels so terrifying! Normally I would stop after 6 glucose tablets, but not then. At such moment there’s no point in worrying about the hyper afterwards. I could only think of raising my blood sugar as quickly as possible, so I devoured at least 70 grams of glucose tabs. Still it took like 40 minutes to get out of that hypo.
Yeah, it was about an hour for me , something like that. It was hell. I kept going to the bathroom to wash my hands and test, I was all sweaty, my legs were like jelly, my heart was pounding, I was overall very uncomfortable and impatiently waiting for my fiance to come home and help me out in some way D: .
I’d normally only take 1 or 2 glucose tablets, but normally I only go hypo into the upper 60’s, rarely any lower…where I often think 1-2 is enough and usually any more makes me like 200 mg/dL…but since I’ve never been in the 30’s I had to pull out all the stops. I’ve been in the 40’s before (because npo+11 unit regular lantus dose at the time=nope not a good idea) but that was in the hospital and they gave me d50 for that and made me like almost 300 with it…but usually my hypos are much higher than that so it’s a weird thing to deal with.
Then I shot up to 255 mg/dL. I hate tonight, I never experience this sorta thing and it’s just making me wanna hop on the cgm train if I can somehow get one, probably not on medicaid but idk.
now I’m almost 400 mg/dL. Can’t win for losing. This is literally the highest my blood sugar has been in years. I haven’t seen a near 400 since starting insulin.
edit: I think my current plan is: no vitamins tomorrow, maybe a meal instead of snack earlier in the evening like 6-7pm (instead of an 8pm protein bar) usual dose of 20 units of basaglar at 10pm, different site (maybe arm?) , back to bd needles not relion. We’ll see how this goes but tonight looks like a sh*tshow.
Sorry to hear about your crappy night. Those are scary and can feel so demoralizing. However, I heard you say you have never been so low and haven’t seen a 400 in years, so what a testament to what great control you’ve celebrated. I hope you gather yourself this morning and have a nice, boring, uneventful day and are able gather a few ideas as to what may have happened.
So sorry you had such a scary low! Gettnig a Libre/Dexcom really helps with those, so if you can get one, I would go for it. I used to go that low several times a year. Since Getting the Dexcom I go that low sometimes still, but not too often.
In a way, the fact that you are feeling super sweaty at such levels is GOOD. It feels terrible, but it also means your body is responding properly and warning you and trying to get that level up. What freaks me out is when I get down to such levels and have NO symptoms whatsoever.
Whenever I woke up with overnight lows on MDI, which for me were always 45 mg/dl or less since I just slept through anything above that, I would set my alarm for the same time the next night or two just to double check that I wasn’t developing a trend. Sometimes it was a sign my Lantus dose needed to be lowered or I needed to have a small snack before bed.
The best thing you can do is get to an endo so you can successfully petition for a CGM.
For the 12-13 years I’ve been using a Dexcom I haven’t had to have an ambulance ride to the hospital for hypoglycemia, about a quarterly occurrence previously.
It is important to try to figure out what’s causing it, but it’s golden to be able to see it coming.
Are you able to download your meter data? Or do you keep a written log? My PCP was happy to do the paperwork for the Dexcom and my part was to submit the data documenting all those scary lows and highs.
I’m hoping if I can’t somehow swing a cgm it’s possible I can fight for levemir or tresiba as that’d be less expensive than trying to pay for a cgm for the insurance company , but at the same time this normally doesn’t happen to me with Lantus/basaglar and I have no reason to believe it’s ever happened before. I’ve always snacked at night because of lantus potentially having some action at night based off what I hear online , which may blunt it, but I’ve also never had that extreme of a low ever even with fast acting so it’s kind of something strange. It’s basically a big ol’ mystery right now but we’ll see how today goes.
So far I’m at 110 mg/dL of my first reading of the day so here’s to hoping it’s all normal , if it is just a one off thing I doubt I could do much about it, but we’ll see.
I agree, at least I felt that nightmare low , that’s a good thing still even if it sucked, because at least my body still tells me and afaik that’s a blessing. I’ve still always felt lows , there was only one period in my life where I had a low-ish level of unawareness and that’s when I was sick and in the hospital a lot and my a1c was like 5%…hasn’t happened in a long time as that was a year into diabetes for me.
I still have my reservations that I’ll get one though with a 6.1% a1c and normally good control , as medicaid basically denies it for convenience /comfort reasons/without bad a1cs and hypoglycemia unawareness …and going by this I’m pretty aware (and the fact I usually will feel a 69 mg/dL low) . Might be able to switch to a different long acting that won’t let the accidental vein/muscle injection happen though. My biggest hope is early enough in the year maybe I can get full time at my job so I have better insurance to work with, maybe :'D .
I use a Bayer Contour Next and as long as I sync it ,it’s up to date…lately I’ve slacked, but it’ll automatically do it even if I don’t do it for a few days. It’s a great tool to have, but I don’t sync it every time, most the time I just use it like a traditional meter then sync it up at night lol.
Sorry to double post, but I’m finding that it’s possible to get the Libre with just an rx and it’s not as out of this world expensive as a Dexcom G6 without insurance (as I know medicaid won’t prolly cover it for me) …so I’m thinking I’ll try to get an endo (as I only have a family practitioner atm being new to medicaid still, not sure if he could prescribe it or at least would be as willing), hopefully they’ll give me an appointment early in the year and I could work it out with them, I think the libre would still be ok and I could still have some degree of figuring things out better, but I don’t think it’ll be all that quick, here’s to hoping though I guess?
@Sensorium139Please get yourself to an endocrinologist. CMS does cover a Dexcom, under certain circumstances. If you take insulin and you have had a serious low, an endo will insist you have one, and he/she will help you get it if you say you want one.
There is no reason an insulin dependent diabetic should not have a CGM–period!
I will, it’s just a matter of my insurance is changing (my insurance plan bought another, is converting all medicaid members in IL to that plan as it was already bigger) so I do prolly have to wait until after the new year to get in anyway between the referral situation , endos tend to have a waiting period around here for new patients, and the insurance situation, but the new insurance medicaid is switching me to does cover a local well rated endocrinologist. I used to have an endocrinologist until the end of last year (still went to him for samples though while I was uninsured and he still cared a lot about getting me those so I’m grateful to him forever lol) , but my medicaid plan no longer covered him…which made me feel really sad because he was a type 1 himself and he’d help me out so much over the 4 years I went to him, considering he was the one that gave me time of day and properly diagnosed me! We debated a cgm in the past for me but because after the pump disaster, not really any other reason, I evened out though …and at the time, due to cheap test strips on insurance (used to get 200 one touch strips for $25 so that was always nice, cheaper than what I pay for bayer contour next strips no matter what) , was testing like 6+ times a day and could prove it to him with my meter. I decided originally not to rush on the endo thing but now I think I gotta call my doc soon and try to get a referral to this lady if he will do it for me, even though she’s with the other hospital’s network. I hated asking for one though as I didn’t want to make him think I doubt him or something, but he did want me to get an endo at the start…so I should of listened D: lol.
I’m so sorry for the scary night! Since you mentioned you’ve never been that low and haven’t been very high for years…have you had pretty tight control recently? I think you were diagnosed as an adult, correct? I was diagnosed 2.5 years ago, and I have noticed that when I have a period of super tight control, I’ll suddenly experience a day (or even two) where my insulin needs drop dramatically - sometimes don’t have to dose anything at all, though sugar is still off the table. It’s like my remaining beta cells get enough of a break w/the tight control, they work again for a little bit. My other thought would be maybe a hormonal change.
I was diagnosed as an adult, yeah. 5.5 years in now , was diagnosed at 22 , now I’m 28. I would wonder about hormones but my period’s been done and over for this month already where I didn’t think that’d cause anything that late on, not pregnant either. I have tight-ish control, but I did somewhat loosen up on it in the past year because my insurance situation hasn’t been super amazing (they don’t cover my strips …yet…next year I think they will if they keep the same formulary with the change over…but will still only cover 3 a day… My a1c recently went from 5.8% where it was for like a long time to 6.1% with no real explanation either when I don’t run high really anyway? Or low really either, for the longest time I’ve just been pretty stable 80-130 mg/dL at all given times rarely higher or lower. So going from 34 to 368 in one night is so off the wall and something that has literally never happened to me before. Who knows, maybe my meter is messing up, but I compared it to two different lab tests now and it’s been spot on and overall I feel I agree with it :/. Only conclusion I have is bad basaglar site, but it’s still…something I’m not sure on and it makes me scared for tonight’s injection.
I just miss having my endo, he would help me out a lot in this situation. I’m hoping getting a new one works out, but I have a doubt the new one will be a type 1 as well as being a doctor and it’s harder to connect on that and truly get it. Sure he was an old dude, but he was also diagnosed at 22 (so was his daughter) so he understood things better than someone who just studied it. Dude studied it and lived it twice in some way.
These types of swings made it very easy for my doctor to get fast insurance approval for a CGM and later a pump for me. Exact same swings from 30’s to 300’s and 400’s.
Is there any way you accidentally double injected? Your numbers have been so stable prior to this point that I also wonder if your body might still be transitioning to “full T1D” for lack of a better term?
You did everything right. You can fix hypers…lows that low need decisive action, IMHO. Please keep us posted. I never like that feeling of being along for the ride when you don’t know where the ride is going.
Keep in mind I only have a meter and I do insulin pens , I’m on Basaglar (lantus) and Admelog (humalog)…starting to think maybe I should ask my doc to refer me to an endo so maybe I can have someone fight for me to get a libre or dexcom so I can see what is trending here…because I literally have no idea why it’s like this and I’m pretty sure I’m testing enough???
