Am i the only one that gets nerves when my blood sugar goes high?
Not sure what you mean by “nerves” but I do get irritable and short-tempered when my glucose is high. I am impatient to get my glucose back in range and if my first attempt doesn’t work, I get even more irritated. I also feel like my skin gets greasy and that makes me uncomfortable, too.
I don’t think you are alone in this. In fact, I’d be surprised if any person with diabetes does not get emotionally irritable when their glucose is high. Maybe people who are high all the time are not bothered by this.
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I think it’s the other way around, when I’m nervous, anxious, angry or stressed I start getting up arrows on my Dexcom screen and injecting insulin is about as effective as saline.
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I know when my BG is rising…not so much as when I’m low. Rising numbers make me feel weak and often nauseous.
Also a low is easy to fix. Using insulin to correct a low takes hours and keeps me edgy.
As an old veteran of type 1 diabetes, having been diagnosed in 1966, I can say that before home glucometers were invented, patients only ever complained about feeling bad when their blood sugar was low. But once they had a meter to tell them when they had high blood sugar around 20 years after I was diagnosed, they decided that that made them feel bad as well. I suspect that the cause is more psychological than physiological.
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That’s probably because people were used to running blood sugars above 10 for hours at a time, it doesn’t mean there aren’t physical symptoms. I can tell you being high often feels worse for me than being low.
I felt very ill and had lots of symptoms with high bg eventually leading to dka at my diagnosis and also now if I go too high. Plenty of us do have symptoms with high bg and the range of what is high varies for everyone.
I was diagnosed four years after you, and believe me, I complained a lot about how crappy it felt to be high, which I was a lot. Being bone-dry thirsty, being foggy-headed, and falling asleep in the first class after lunch gave me much to complain about.
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For me at least, if I feel absolutely great I can be sure my blood sugar is high. It is almost as though my body always had a natural requirement to function at a higher glucose level, and sometimes I have even felt that the autoimmune destruction of my beta cells seems like a self-adjustment of the body to reach the glucose levels it is comfortable with. In contrast, if I feel tired and sleepy, I know I am down to around 120 mg/%, and yet this is after a decade of A1c values in the 4-range, so the usual explanation, that I have acclimatized to a higher level from long-term hyperglycemia, doesn’t work.
Some creatures do naturally require higher blood sugar levels than humans, and hummingbirds need 600 mg/% on average, and chickens as well have much higher levels than humans. Interestingly, although these animals have vascular systems, retinas, and kidneys, they experience no damage from a life of hyperglycemia. Perhaps they are genetically protected against it just as some humans are.
Maybe you aren’t human
My father was a hummingbird.
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@Scott_Eric, @Seydlitz,
You guys are hilarious!
You are both birds.
Blue Jay and Hummingbird. LOL
Me? Penguin.
I also feel optimal (mental sharpness, athletic performance, other…) with what many others would consider high. Do people have different optimal levels, have I adapted to the out of range symptoms? It either takes a sharp change in BG or a very long stay at a high before I get these nerves, but I do get them.