The heat wave from this past weekend had all of us scrambling to stay indoors but crazy thing happened, both on sat and sun, I had 2 episodes of low sugars 67 on sat and 65 on sun, they both happened at about 2 am though. Bear in mind that I am a T2 even though am on Insulin so lows are very rare for me and other than the heat, nothing else happened out of the ordinary. I have been researching, looking for a link between the two but the answers I come up with are all general at best ie heat exhaustion/ dehydration/ heat stroke and all that so anyone ever experience this?
The same thing happened to me on Saturday, except my low was 33! Sunday, I overcompensated a bit & ran a little high, but felt more comfortable doing that than the reverse. I don’t think it’s that unusual for extreme heat, especially combined with high humidity, to impact us that way.
I’m a type 1 and, yes, heat does make you go low. How it has been explained to me is that the heat speeds up the absorbtion of insulin, thus causing whatever insulin you inject or infuse to get used up much faster. This then causes you to be more likely to go low. Dehydration can exacerbate this, but the faster absorbtion is the primary culprit. Some of my worst/scariest lows have occurred during the summer months. This heat wave has been particularly hard for me this past week. I use public transit to get to/from work and have gone low almost every day while on the Metro. One was really scary and I almost needed some assistance because it hit me so fast. As a kid, all my really bad lows also happened during the summer months. I’m on the pump and because I’m not using a basal insulin, I can generally catch my lows before they get too bad.
@Barrie Wow, normally when I go below 70 I can feel the effects right away, the incidents this past weekend actually woke me up but yes 33 is pretty scary…
