So, I just had a diabetes weekend from hell involving multiple pod failures/absorption problems, sugar fairies, blood sugars sitting at 200-250 for hours despite lots of injections, very little food (my tummy is the flattest it’s been in 3 years!), and estreme frustration.
One thing that made this weekend from hell unique is that I’ve had ketones on and off all weekend. Usually once they are gone and my blood sugar is stabilized, they are gone for good. But, they seem to keep coming and going. Even after I stabilized my blood sugars in the 75-90 range for 12 hours I woke up with moderate ketones. The same thing happened earlier in the day yesterday where I was negative for them for hours and decided to have a salad. I had moderate ones again 2 hours later despite peaking at 145-150. What the heck is going on?! I only had a protein bar and some salad yesterday so maybe it is being worsened by not eating?
What causes ketones to come and go like that? Maybe it is normal for some people but I’ve never had this happen before so I’m a bit concerned!
Blood test for ketones or urine test? Urine test will lag “real time” by 12 hours easily after a sizable ketone event.
If part of your response to high bg’s was to eliminate carbs and go to a ketogenic diet (e.g. salad and no carbs) you can have some ketones due to the diet if nothing else.
I don’t know how modern electronic ketone meters read, but good old urine test strips have a gentle gradation that lets me see both trace ketones and substantial ketones. Substantial ketones can be a concentration of several hundred times more than trace ketones. That wide dynamic range also happens to define (at least in my head) the scale of ketone events. bg meters handle a much narrower dyanmic range. Don’t know much about electronic ketone meters.
You can definitely get ketones by not eating or not eating much. I’ve read people can get ketones just by going for a long time without eating.
I’m trying to eat < 100g of carbs a day and the other day I was kind of high (stuck at 11-12, 200-230 range) and was kind of surprised I had moderate urine ketones when I tested. It made me nervous. But when I tested blood ketones it was 0.0 mmol/L, so … who knows, but I don’t think it’s dangerous. I did change infusion sites, though, because I’d been doing corrections for hours that were having almost no effect, so I think something was up with my site as well.
I don’t really know much about when ketones are dangerous versus when they are not. Hopefully someone else can clarify, as I’d be curious as well!
I use the urine ketone tests. I’ve been curious to try the ketone meters but they are pretty pricy! I didn’t know that the ketone urine test lagged real time by that long, so maybe that has something to do with it. I have rarely ever had moderate ketones in my 12 years of being diabetic unless my blood sugars have been 300 or 400 and mine were in the low to mid 200s so it was definitely a strange event.
