Insulin needs change after getting sick?

Type 1 and LADA Parents of Children with Type 1 Diabetes
#1

My son Kristian is 3 years old and diagnosed a year ago. This past winter has been HELL! He has gotten sick with everything- swine flu, croup, you name it. His sugar gets extremely high when he is sick, and we've never had to deal with him vomiting.

He got sick last week and was puking every 30 minutes and it was coming out the other end too. I had to give him his glucagon shot because he had just had his insulin an hour before and eaten dinner, then he started puking everything up. This lasted for 4 days. His sugar never got high the whole time he was sick.

Now that he is better and eating again, it is really strange because his body is not requiring as much insulin as it did before he got sick. I have been getting severe lows even though I have cut his insulin in half, and he is eating the same things as before. Has anyone ever experienced this before? I could probably cut out his Novolog completely and just give him his basal. Weird.....

#2

We have had extreme lows for days after being sick. Ella was dx at 2 and is now 3. She held her bowls for 2 days until we had to take her to the ER for an enima and fluids. After the enima she was low for 2 to 3 days.

She has since recovered… but is this a temporary change after being sick or something you notice that hangs out long term??

#3

We’ve had much the same experience a couple of times with our daughter. Within a day of getting sick she started trending lower and lower. Her sliding scale for correcting if she did go high was consistent, but she needed only very little Humalog, if any, to cover meals. By the third or fourth day I even had to start cutting back on her Lantus. Each time it lasted about a week–followed unfortunately by a number of highs while I scrambled to change course again and things got back to normal.

Rather a bit nerve-wracking and, after living with diabetes for just four years it was a very odd experience to forego insulin for some meals and occasionally plying her with carb snacks sometimes hourly.

She has had some lower trends and slight decrease in insulin needs after being on antibotics a couple of times, but not as long-lasting or extreme as the two week-long bouts.

#4

Hi Kristian,

Good to hear your son is doing good now. My daughter is grown but she has gone through insulin changes and sickness.

Hopefully there will be more good days than bad to come as he grows older and better medicine come or cures

#5

We have this problem every time my son gets really sick. After a week or two his blood sugar stabilizes and we gradually get back to his original doses. I hope your son is doing better soon.

#6

Thanks everyone! It all did finally go back to normal after a while. Whew! So glad it’s over. It was just really strange for us this time because whenever he had been sick in the past his sugar tends to shoot up to the 400-500 range and it likes to stay there. This time it was different because it got low!