Two Days Prior
I went and saw my Endocrinilogoist for diabetes, and everything looked great. He noticed that my sugar level had been dropping overnight very significantly, so he went on to change some of my settings in my insulin pump. He changed what’s called a basal rate, or the amount of insulin I’m getting at all times without having to put anything in.
Midnight
Fast forward to today and I wake up around midnight and check my glucose level as I typically do whenever I wake up, and it was at 110, otherwise known as a normal level. At this time, I knew that I was getting less basal rate than normal, so I went back to sleep without consuming anything with carbs (I would typically eat something, knowing my glucose level drops throughout the night).
7 Am
I wake up around 7 am and I know it’s low, but don’t feel any extra different from how it typically feels. I go to check it, and for the first time ever it just says “Lo” without giving me an actual reading/number. This means that my glucose level was so low that my device doesn’t even care to register at that point. The only thing I can do is go and eat something in order to bring it back to normal. So I go to make a bowl of cereal and eat it. That’s it, right?
I decided to eat while watching some videos as I always do, but noticed something off… I couldn’t read any of the titles for the videos. In fact, I could no longer read anything, at all. I started panicking a bit and tried scrolling through in hopes to find a single word that made sense, but I simply could not. All words looked foreign. I had my wife come over while this was going on and she, too, was dumbfounded at my inability to read. Thankfully, I was able to piece together that this was only because of my low sugar level but it took a lot to get back into the right mindset.
After my glucose level shot up to 215 and my eyesight came back, I figured that I would be fine. About 30 minutes in from that point and my head starts hurting, which then turned into my first migraine ever. Unfortunately, along with my first experience with this, I also became nauseous. I went about three hours with both the worst headache and the worst nausea I’ve had until finally, I end up vomiting.
I begin to feel a lot better but there was another issue lurking around the corner… My glucose level started to get low again. This was an issue because of the vomiting that would continue to take place for a while, I wasn’t able to hold anything with sugar/carbs down. My sugar dropped to 65, then 60, then 51 in a matter of a few minutes and if it dropped below 40, I now knew that my device wouldn’t be able to measure it. I didn’t have any other choice, my wife had to go and grab the glucagon kit (emergency diabetes kit) that I have never in my 14 years of diabetes, had to use.
The Glucagon kit is basically a needle with water and a sugar mixture that would be injected directly into me in order to get my glucose level up temporarily. I use to renew this kit every now and again in case I ever had to use it, but I hadn’t done so in years because I figured it would never be necessary. The one we had was obviously expired but still worked all the same.
After about 20 minutes, my glucose level got up to 109 and I became much more relieved mentally but physically, I was in rough shape. My migraine and nausea went on to last another 6 hours. I got up out of bed around 3 pm and finally got ahold of my work phone, and called off for the day. I gradually started drinking water again and slowly started walking around. Whilst writing this (11:20 pm) I’m still currently dealing with a headache but it was nothing like it was before, and no more nausea, thankfully. So, the moral of the story is…
Take care of yourself,
Mason