For me, I feel giddy and irritable. Also, My legs feels so weak, that I would just like to lie down all day.
Yep, it also affects my whole body…
Like everyone said, highs make me feel tired and headachy and very irritable. Lows make me sweaty and shaky and once corrected I have to sleep, I have no choise, i will fall asleep where ever I am. So it is better that I just go do it, once I have a couple hours then i can begin to function, usually. Sometimes if I get really really low I end up just kind of vegging all day. I havben’t passed out from one yet, but I have gone so low the meter didn’t read it. just said “low”. i agree with the “hit by a truck” feeling though.
Thankfully, being type 2 keeps me from having very many lows, but here goes:
Lows:
As BG is dropping I become nauseated. As the drop progresses I can begin to tremble, and finally I will begin to notice that I’m having difficulty thinking. One time I actually had difficulty speaking.
Highs:
Before I got my BG under control I commonly had blurred vision when high. That seems to have gone away and now the symptoms come down to burning in my extremities, overall feeling of fever, dehydration, and frequent urination. I think the worst thing is the irritability that comes with a high. It just seems so much easier to become frustrated, and this makes the condition seem worse.
Well its like trying to explain to co-workers what your going thourgh. They think you just had a snack you should be better like 5 minutes after i eat the carbs.Well when i am low. I sometimes get shakey and sweaty, confused of my surroundings.or no signs thats really scary. I try to get to my meter before this happens. And if i get in the 200 thats i High and i feel like CRAP! i dont even wanna MOVE! now if i get that HIGH! I love pumping correct bolus is a GOD SIZED SENT! It kinda hard to explain to a non diabetic. As i explain to hr a work its like train wreck you never know when your going low. Thats what i told them when they told me to punch out to get a snack, But thats againest disabilty act! But thats another topic. bye:)
About 10 years ago(about 36 years with Diabetes) with a high, I used to feel symptoms like tired/groggy, bloated, nausea, headache. After all these years, now I just feel tired.
For lows before, I could go from feeling excitement to irritated to powerful to terrified to total dispair to giggly. Symptoms of headache, pounding heart, numb lips, continually dropping the same object, exhaustion, confusion, sweaty feeling, visual affects, etc.
Now, I just sometimes have symptoms of feeling sweaty and Very tired. Otherwise, nothing. I check more often now and thankfully have less highs and lows. Strangely enough, the signals of lows and highs disappeared around the time I changed Insulins. I’m not saying that that is a reason. Lack of symptoms is mainly supposed to be due to having Diabetes for so many years.
Oh, there is one new symptom I have noticed for some time when I am low. I feel the Very slightest of a buzzing feeling on my scalp, cheeks and temples. When I feel this, I stop everything. My mind then tells me to test. Seems to work Well. I suspect it is a way of the my body trying to protect itself, like a blind Person gains another sense for protection.
About the buzzing feeling, I usually have that as well…just really haven’t paid attention to it.
I’ll check that out next time…
When I am too high, it feels like I am swimming though molasses. Everything is slow motion, feel washed out, and depressed. If low, my lips tingle, I turn white and get really dizzy, lightheaded and feel like I am going to faint. I try REALLY hard not to get too low!
I made some neat videos explaining the symptoms on youtube.com Check them out.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWsl8S_0JhU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9R_qsvhvE4
Check out my channel. “1HappyDiabetic” searchable on youtube
Lows - I feel like a giant hand is pushing down on me and everything takes a tremendous amount of effort. The best way I can explain it to non-diabetics is to imagine how weak they feel when they have a really bad cold or flu. Sometimes my tonque and lips go numb if I’m really low. Usually, I become really sensitive to sound and have to turn the volume down on the tv, headphones etc (anyone else do this???).
Highs - Don’t feel terrible but I do know when I have them. Usually, my mouth gets all pasty and my breathe is bad. Sometimes I get a headache (lows too).
I felt myself going low the other day coming out of the shower, late morning (around 10:30). It usually starts with a funny, shaky inside feeling and a little bit of a disconnect with the world around. If I’m around people I get really snippy with them. But it quickly becomes this overwhelming “test NOW! eat NOW!” feeling some other folks have described, and I lose words–I can’t communicate. I think what I want to say, but I can’t make it come out. With the low the other day, I came into the living room to sit down and test, and my partner was trying to talk to me (he could tell what was happening) but all i could do was wave him off. I tested (58) and ate several of the glucose tabs I keep for lows, then sat on the floor for a while until I could speak again.
I think what most non-diabetic folk don’t understand is that, just because your numbers return to normal, it doesn’t mean you’re really back to normal. In this instance, I had to lay down on the floor for a bit, and ended up sleeping for almost an hour, right there! I felt like a wrung-out dish rag for the rest of the day.
Then there was the time that a low (weird day at my sister’s, we skipped lunch after a late breakfast) woke me up from a dead sleep around 3pm. It was a real effort just to stumble downstairs to my meter. Freaked my sister out, since she’s not used to dealing with it (we live in different states). She’s asking me all sorts of questions, and all I could do was wave her off, shaking my head. Inside my head I was yelling at her “stop talking to me! Just let me do this!” but of course I couldn’t form the words.
This fits me to a tee…My problem is I ride with my hubby a lot…he is a locksmith…sometimes we get
busy and it ends up dinner time and my insulin is home…so I end up eating
late and go low.sure wish there was a easy way to carry it…I have the tiny
mini-refrigerator that plugs into car…It holds up to I think it is 5 vials…
but for sure if I take that we don’t need it…I’m thinking I should just carry
it when I go off all the time…What do you think ?it sure is a neat little thing…The addy below
shows what it is…
http://www.diabeticexpress.com/content/ProductDetail.aspx?CategoryI…
tegoryID=156&ItemID=15-95
I just had an unexplainable low this afternoon. It starts with just feeling “weird,” and I’ve learned to check at that point–doesn’t always turn out to be low bg, but it sure was today. Then I get shaky, extra sweaty (I sweat all the time anyway, but this is worse), and really can’t think straight.
When I’m high the primary clue I have is that I get unexplainably irritable and grouchy.
For me to feel really weird when I get high it has to be at about 400+. Otherwise I can get in the 300’s and have no real side effects except being super thirsty. But once it gets lower I’m fine.
As for being low, I just normally get shaky, and sometimes a little confused.
I have woke up in the middle up the night being in the 40’s or 50’s, and get really scared once I see my number. I will sit on the kitchen floor just eating until I don’t feel shaky or dizzy anymore. And then I feel sick…
Highs make me feel super, super hungry and exhausted.
When I go low everything feels like slow motion and my brain gets all fuzzy. It’s like having the sound turned off on the TV – I can tell my brain is trying to think something, but I can’t tell what it is. I know I need to eat but I can’t think of anything to have. My partner talks to me and I can understand what he’s saying, but I can’t think of anything to say back. My mind just stays blank.
After a few times of this happening, we made a little stash of these special caramels that I love. Now when he asks me what I want to eat and I can’t think of anything, he gives me one of those and a glass of water, and I go sit down for awhile.
When my blood glucose gets to high my feet start to kill me, my vision gets funky and I will get very agitated and sleepy. Getting other people to understand why I am so agitated does not work since they could not possibly understand, unless they are diabetic . I will usually just go to bed because it feels good to lie down when I get a high. After a bad high I feel like crap for at least a day.
I really do not get to many low blood glucose levels but when I do it sucks because I feel like my head is in the clouds and nothing makes sense to me, someone could say could say hello to me and I wouldn’t even notice them if my blood glucose is to low. The other sign that I am getting a low is a sensation of numbness in my throat, face and fingers. The main problem for me, however, is getting other people to understand why I am so different when my blood glucose get to high or low; I suspect this is a problem for most other people with diabetes but I am not sure.
Yes, I also have the great fatigue, after either a low or a high. I don’t usually go really high anymore, last time was when I obviously had some kind of infection I didn’t otherwise know about, high for most of a weekend, but either high or low, I am sooo tired, during a high and after a low.
My husband understands about the lows now, as he has seen a few. I have never gone dangerously low, as I at least so far can really feel it happening and correct for it. But I’ve told him that highs are dangerous long-term as the more high glucose the more long-term complications, but lows are dangerous in the short term, and they need to be taken care of RIGHT NOW.
When I am high I feel saturated. - that’s the best description for me. Full of water, like my bloodstream is bloated. and Really Thirsty.
When I am low (depending how low) I can’t think straight and sometimes lose control of muscles. One time I got low and could not control my arms…they started flailing around. It was very weird…especially to my friend who was there trying to get me some juice. I will become angry sometimes, and have refused to drink my OJ, like a 5 year old having a tantrum.
When I am low and am asleep, sometimes I will wake myself up, but still stay half asleep. Once I was having a dream about wizards or something and I woke up, having a low, and kept imagining that I was still within this fantasy dream. I started looking for the scrolls in the bedroom. That took some time to wake up from.
But the best one was last month when I slapped my mother in law on the butt. LOL luckily she understood and thought it was amusing. : )
Oh my that is funny!
you can have lows even if you don’t take insulin…
I was actually just about to post on this! What a relief for me to come and read on this topic. For over a year (May '07) I’ve been having this horrific fatigue/exhaustion. I have been diagnosed with mild sleep apnea, but it is not high enough for the insurance to really do anything about it.
Well, in June of this year I was finally diagnosed, but I was never really told that the fatigue could be my numbers going too weird. I am in bed for at least a day after going on the simplest errands or having mental stress put on me.
I’m going to confess and say that yeah, I haven’t exactly been doing what I need to lately. That’s gonna change, because I am so tired of feeling run over by a truck, no matter what else I try.