Thanks. I’m not sure we dismissed the idea of an overnight low. She asked what symptoms he has when he goes low overnight and he said he didn’t know because to our knowledge it’s never happened - none caught with testing, no rebound highs, no messed up sheets in the morning. If he’s going low, we don’t have any evidence to indicate that.
If we don’t plan properly for exercise, i.e. reducing basal rates, testing & beefing up blood sugar, snacking afterward or during if need be, my son will have exercise induced lows. When that happens, we always test him during the night knowing a low is more likely following exercise or following days with lows when the glycogen stores in the liver might not have had time to be replenished.
I’m concerned, believe me! I feel fortunate that overnight lows haven’t been an issue and hope it stays that way. There have been glucose tabs and juice on my son’s nightstand since the day he was diagnosed. Fortunately, they are still there. Come to think of it, I probably should change out that juice box for a fresh one since we’re coming up on a year.
I hope we have many years before alcohol figures into the mix. If not, I think low blood sugar would be the least of our problems!
When my son was first diagnosed, I did a LOT of research on ‘dead in bed’ as the prospect of that is gut-wrenching for any parent to imagine. All the anecdotal stories I read were scary, but when I looked at actual data, it’s rare, and, in many cases, the believed cause is long QT syndrome (the same syndrome in which healthy young athletes drop dead on the basketball court or football field) which is triggered by hypoglycemia. In other words, the children had an unknown heart issue and hypoglycemia trigged the heart reponse leading to death.
We are very cautious about our insulin dosing, blood sugar numbers and testing as much as we feel the need to test to keep our son safe, including through the night when we deem it prudent. Short of me sitting by his bedside all night, at some point, I have to trust that I took all the precautions I know to take, and then let it go.
As parents, if we want our children to grow into functional, healthy adults, we can’t shelter them from every possible risk, and we could truly make ourselves crazy if we constantly focus on all of the potential bad things that could happen to our children - overnight lows, car accidents, kidnapping, concussions from sports, etc. Believe me, there have been times I’d like to wrap my kids in bubble wrap and never let them step foot out the door!
Thanks for your input, although where the idea comes from that I’m in any way cavalier about lows overnight eludes me. I’m not, they just aren’t happening. I’m on the lookout for them, but, perhaps because we are abundantly cautious, that’s why they aren’t happening?
Yours is a healthy, rational attitude. You’re doing everything you can. It may very well be that your diligence is paying off. Agree that dead in bed is relatively rare, as tragic as it is.
I agree with Gerri that you have a very healthy attitude. I think it is important that we are aware of potential problems, but we also should not live our lives in fear of something that may never happen.
Hello there, I also have a 13 year old son now on the omnipod, i feel we are similar to our approach and attitude about diabetes. my son has never had a night time low ( occasionally in the 60’s in the am) we plan accordingly, i probably overshoot with food or undershoot with his night time bolus if he is running low at night time snack, I always make sure he is over 100 before bed and have really only checked him at night when transitioning to the pump or when sick. Probably if he was really active in sports i would check more but he is not. Listening to some posts on here makes me feel more anxious, parents doing multiply nightly checks etc, I know my son and his diabetes well now, if he does have a night time low our bedrooms are right next to eachother and i’ve been told he would be loud and squirming if he was low, everynight i wake up to go to the bathroom and check to make sure he is breathing steady, like a new born! other than that i try to let it go diabetes takes up so much thought and concern, i feel like my son feels safe and only bothered and different from his diagnosis, to have him especially live with fear would be hard to deal with i am trying to teach him to live with his diabetes like he does brushing his teeth, making healthy choices and mostly seeing the joy in life rather than the inconvenience and worry. good luck i think we would have a lot to share with each other! amy
Thank you - it does sound like we try to approach this in a similar fashion and that our son’s are the same age and were diagnosed around the same age. I hate that my son has to deal with this disease, but I’m so thankful that, if he had to get it, he is at an age to really be an active participant in his own care. I can’t imagine how tough it would be to go through all this with a little one. Take care and thanks again.
The last time I had a serious hypo (after dinner, rather than at night…) the paramedics were alarmed by an irregular heartbeat. I went for a bunch of expen$ive cardiac tests that were all negative. Then the endo (with whom I wa working on this, as she was alarmed by the hypo…) suggested follow-up with a cardiologist “for more tests”. By then, I’d read a couple of books (nervously, of course…), none of which mentioned a connection between hypoglycemia and arrythmia but, when I asked the endo if there could be a connection, she said “maybe…” so I blew off the rest of the tests.
The thing that seems to be missing from the “dead in bed” and other hypo death horror storie are the case histories, how was the patient doing, what had the patient done at that time, etc. I am sure having a kid is very hair-raising but I think that if you are on top of it, you may be reasonably safe? I have told junior that I need to go to cheerleader tryouts to make sure they are safe and have been told “OH MY GOD!!”. Really, I was kidding but figured I’d keep her on her toes. Hee hee…
I test my blood sugar 18 times during my waking hours because I know for a fact that is where my problems are. I used a Dexcom for over a year and a Navigator for 3 months. My standard deviation most nights was zero - meaning my blood sugar did not vary much during the night. Having to set my alarm in the middle of the night would be a burden to me. I know other people that don’t and function very well. The people that do run around with a lack of sleep and create more problems for themselves. Lack of sleep actually causes blood sugar to go up. I function better on a full nights sleep. Not everyone has lows at night. As I said, there is no need to worry about it because I doubt it will happen. If you want to worry and wake up every night, that is your choice. It is not everyone’s choice.
I don’t worry about a cure at all. I used to worry about being dead but don’t worry about that all that much any more either. I try to distract myself with hobbies and activities and nagging my daughter. Between that and work and running a tight diabetes ship, I’m usually wiped out.
I had a wierd patch recently, where my BG at night was running up a ton, I’m not sure what it was but since the race it’s really smoothed out and I’m a lot more relaxed. Surgery on Friday though will be a new adventure! I have reserved Harold and Kumar@ the library to go along with the painkillers…heh heh heh…
I know what you mean about getting old. I have Alzheimer’s on both sides so I figure when junior goes to college, I’ll start smoking? If I remember. There was a CWD board thread w/ all these parents going ballistic about the JDRF funnelling some of their vast amounts of dough into something besides a cure and I was sort of puzzled because I would rather see a lot of resources poured into getting the medical industry to adopt a more thoughtful approach overall with a goal of influencing the insurance industry to suck it up and take care of people instead of pulling the “you need 7 test strips/ day” ■■■■■■■■ all the time. A new generation of research ought to study tighter control than the studies that have been done to date, find out how safe it is and if there are benefits to it. There’s tons of people here and on other boards who do that and most of them seem to be reporting that they are in reasonably good shape? This may, of coure, be internet crap (except for me, of course… :-P) but I think that it seem prevelent enough to warrant the medical industry looking into new approaches and designing them to be more accessable to more people, with a long-term goal of improving our long term prospects and lowering our long term costs? I have no evidence that this would work but I have to think that it would be worth a small amount of resources diverted from the “artificial pancreas” hooplah to investigate.
I don’t think they’re inevitable but it’s definitely unusual not to have ANY. The hormonal shifts of childhood pretty much guarantee a certain amount of instability in blood sugar even during the night. You must either have some wicked good basal control going on, or else you’ve got some sort of guardian angel slipping him some sugar overnight!
What’s his a1c like? Is it possible that his overnight basal rate is too low and he’s therefore staying higher than he should overnight, and then coming back down to his starting point by morning? We put Eric (my son, age 4) on a CGM because we wanted to see his overnight patterns and a 2 or 3 a.m. test really wasn’t telling us much, and sure enough, we found he was doing a lovely parabola --up up up after about 9:30 PM (not visible to the test when he went to bed at 8:00) and then gliding down down down after about 2:30 AM (and of course I was testing at 2). So what it meant was, we weren’t giving him enough basal from about 9-12, and then correcting him at 2:30 would wind up giving him too much because the basal setting from 2-4 didn’t change to match his decreased insulin needs. Now we have him on a basal pattern that rises from 9-12 and dips down from 2-4. We still get weird fluctuations from time to time, usually when he’s sick, but at least with the CGM I can see them.
His a1c is 6.1 as of last week; that was up a little from 5.8 in June. This time last year when he was diagnosed, it was 14.3 - yikes! I do think his basal is pretty spot on, at least for now.
I think too that there’s a difference, for the better, if you are really engaged with it. If my BG gets out of whack for 3 days, I’ll start fiddling around with rates and ratios to fix it. I also think that it helps tremendously to have a positive “Right Stuff” attitude, to saying “light the candle” and putting on your helmet and blasting off. Doctors often seem to express concern about logs full of lows or hair-raising storie and are always going “be careful” but, at the same time, they seem pleased with the overall results, generally decent A1Cs, resting heart rate in the 50s, good cholesterol, BP ok after trending up when I was heavier, etc. This is all stuff that teenagers may be oblivious too while they are doing teenage things but I think that it’s not too early to start getting kids going on knowing how to run the show. They are taking science classes and, in many cases, may be much better at it than we are?
my husband was looking at a pic of jacob when he was a toddler and said thank god we didn’t have to deal with diabetes then god gave us 10 year without it, i agree with you, being diag. at 10 he was able to handle it without rebelling like an older teen might it is a tough disorder emotionally and physically but as parents we can help our kids deal as best we can and let them live their lives with as much normalcy as possible have a good week
OK AR, you know I love ya, but I have to ask, how do you know that Austin Mom’s candle is not burning a hundred times brighter than yours? Just because she chooses to do things differently than you do doesn’t mean that she doesn’t have the right attitude or isn’t working very hard for her kid. To read some of these posts here, I am some big slacker because I choose to sleep thru the night instead of setting my alarm every night to get up and test my BS. I know from the posts that I read here about the things people do that I work a lot harder than a lot of people – I have to work harder because of the medical problems I have that cause BS problems. My problems are not at night, they are during the day so I focus my energy on the areas that I do have a problem with. I don’t care who you are, there are only so many hours in a day.
Most of the people getting up in the middle of the night to test BS are people reading message boards. My friend doesn’t do it for her kid and if she came to this board, she would be crucified. One of her neighbors has a T1 kid also and they don’t do it either. My friend’s endo had her doing it for a few weeks when he first started insulin and was told to stop after that. I know her personally and I know what kind of person she is. I know what kind of mother she is and she would give up her own life for her kids. She does live with the right attitude and she burns her candle at both ends for her kids. Just because she does things differently does not mean that she does not have the right attitude or isn’t burning the candle 100 times brighter than you or anyone else that thinks she needs to set her alarm at 3 AM every night.
