I was told I wanted avoid lows. I was told about the headache and the shaking. The body-wide sweat was not mentioned. The confusion and wonky mental business was something that caught me by surprise. It didn’t help one bit that I was a slow learner. Confusion doesn’t even come close to describing the drooling sod I become sometimes.
I made light of some of the amusing things I’ve done, but I’ve also had lows that have left me seriously anxious, guilty, and embarrassed. I have also had a number of lows that were personally terrifying for me. It was a motivator for getting serious about my control and exploiting CGM and pump technologies.
Taking the bull by the horns had the unexpected benefit of alleviating a great deal of my depression. I find now that I’m not suspicious I’m low until I’m in the 40s. I’m at a new job now, so i expect that I’ll get one of the red, splotchy, flop sweat kinds or worse. But it did occur to me today that my vigilance had paid off. I’ve avoided getting so low that I hit my less pleasant symptoms. Now that I’ve said that, I’ll probably have a visit with the EMTs and a ride to the ER in my near future.
You didn’t ask for this and this business is complicated–mood, weather, health, situation,and stress all contribute to what’s going on with your glucose. You have control over some things and other things not so much. . Give yourself a break for not getting it right sometimes. Experience is a great teacher but it doesn’t always come cheap.
One time I went hypo when out on a long walk. I went into the grocery and got some juice, but when I got to the cash register I couldn’t figure out how to use the card-reader. I kept reading the instructions but they didn’t make sense. They might as well have been in Swahili or Martian.
This was the grocery that I’ve been going to several times per month for years!
I finally asked the manager if I could sit down somewhere, drink my juice and pay him when my head cleared. He was cool with it, but I felt really silly.
If you get nauseated, and refuse to eat, glucagon might be a good solution for you. Your husband would still have to get it ready and inject it, but at least he’d avoid the struggle to get you to eat something.
I was master clerking at a cat show, which involves meticulously copying numbers from the judge’s sheets into a master catalog. I had a can of regular Coke right in front of me just in case. And I did go low, but did I see the can of Coke? NOOOOOOO!!! I went wandering around the hall until I found my one Type 1 diabetic friend in the cat fancy, and butted my head into his stomach and told him I needed a Coke. He dutifully went and bought me one, and I drank it, and he sat with me and wouldn’t let me touch the master catalog until he was sure I was mentally alert enough to do it. THEN I saw the can of Coke sitting there.
Another time, I got into the car, low, and while I had a bottle of Coke there for just that reason, again, I didn’t see it, and spent about 10 minutes scrabbling through my purse for some tired old wrapped candy. I bet you didn’t know Coke has the talent of invisibility.
So I think I’ve given up on Coke. When I’m at home, I’m pretty good at going straight to the sugar cannister – I don’t use sugar for anything else – and just spooning it up. It doesn’t taste particularly good straight like that, but it does raise BGs. I have glucose tablets in my purse, but it remains to be seen whether I’ll remember they’re there when I next need them! But I’m lucky because most of my friends tend to carry candy with them just in case!
Food generally has a habit of disappearing! I carry a bag with all sorts of things in them - I use little plastic boxes - bought a lot when I visited Japan Town in SF a couple of months ago! Now go to the local cheap supermarket and buy their own brand big packs of sweets (or candy if you are in America) and fill the boxes. Reason why so many is because I can just shove my hand into the bag and pull out the first box.
Also I sometimes get so low I cannot remember HOW to eat!
It pays to shop regularly! I have done the same. Been in the supermarket, gone hypo and come to at the cash register and found myself paying for some really weird things, some that I do not even like, but I have already eaten it or am part way through!
Just had mini chocolate eggs for first breakfast!
Hi Natalie. I don’t think I could just spoon up sugar to eat after brainwashing myself on the evils of sugar. A teaspoon or two of honey works well though, and tastes good too. Some people even think it might be good for you, who knows? As for doing nutty things while low, I’ll never forget the time I went low while watching TV. I came up from a stupor watching Star Trek, absolutely convinced that earth was being invaded by aliens.
I’m a sleep eater! I also used to act strangely, make faces and start stinging (< tone deaf) random lines to songs. My brother is also a sleep eater, though much much worse than me. I usually remember flashes of getting up to eat whereas he really has absolutely no recollection of it. His ex used to wakeup and find all kinds of stuff, like a PB sandwich or a bowl of icecream, in the microwave and food all over the place. Actually, he was a sleep eater even before diagnosis come to think of it. I don’t see to much nowadays, most of my symptoms have disappeared.
I never got brainwashed about the evils of sugar. I got standard ADA advice many years ago, but that has faded from my memory anyway! And the cannister, for some reason, is the only thing that sticks in my mind when I’m mentally-impaired low. I have glucose tablets by my bed, but still head straight to the cannister. Whatever works, eh? 
I used to be a sleepwalker – thank God I haven’t done it in years!
When I was in high school once, I woke up to find LEAVES in my bed, clinging to my feet and sheets. My father was upset because the sliding-glass door to the back yard was wide open with the curtains being flapped madly by the wind.
As near as I can figure, I went downstairs and out the back door into the yard, then back up to my bed – NAKED.
Thank goodness for our quiet, suburban neighborhood. If I’d done this in a gritty urban neighborhood, I might have disappeared forever.
Looking back on this now, I realize that I had severe reactive hypoglycemia in my youth, decades before I was diagnosed type 2. Maybe I was just having a bad hypo and didn’t realize it.
That sounds like the truth! About the hypoglycaemia, I mean. I used to get a lot of hypos before I was diagnosed many years later with Type 1.
I remember one night waking up to an enormous crash! I had fallen over my desk and smashed it! I had been dreaming that I was in the neighbour’s house and needed to go and get some sugar for the tea (and I needed the toilet which was an outdoor one next door!) I think I had got up and was still dreaming, negotiating the neighbours’ furniture and collided with my desk. I was beaten black and blue by my dad who was so cross because of my clumsiness! I was sweating so hard, it must have been a hypo and I must have known vaguely that I needed sugar!
In a pinch I’ve done the packets of sugar. I can’t stand the granular texture of sugar. It feels to me like I’m eating sand. These days I just keep glucose tabs close at hand. With anything else I have a hard time not over-treating. I also find the dextrose works a bit faster than a lot of other stuff. Granulated sugar is my last route.
I had that happen when I was watching an episode of Dr. Who. I knew that we had the pocket watch the aliens were looking for and and I KNEW they were coming after us to get it. For some reason I thought my partner (the big Dr. Who fan in the house) didn’t know and I had to keep it from him. It was exactly the plot that was being developed. I went into the bathroom and just shook for a minute. Then I checked my glucose and I was 42. I had a really scary few minutes. Now he makes me check my glucose before I watch Dr. Who or Monty Python. For some reason Python drops me like a rock. It can be a little obtuse so if you’re not all there, more than once I’ve turned to him to say, “I don’t have any idea what’s going on.” Or he will ask me, “is your sugar high enough for Python?”
Hi SF Pete. That was one of my very first lows, maybe 17 years ago, and I’ve never forgotten it. Luckily I had food on my nightstand, started munching on it absentmindedly while watching the “earth invasion,” and didn’t realize the truth for at least half an hour. I still love to watch any of the Star Treks, and never fail to have a flashback.
No super strange ones for me yet(knock on wood). My mother is a different story, She used to make the best casseroles when she went low when I was a kid. Ask her how she did it “I don’t know I was low”. She locked her self in the bathroom once cause she thought we where trying to poison her. She regularly will start laughing for no reason and tugging on her hair when she is low. Some of the best have been mistakes on our end when she wasn’t low, like the time the farm on the other side of the swamp/woods of the house I grew up in had a pig escape. For 2 days she would see this pig try to point it out to us and of course it was “go check yourself mom”. She jumped for joy when my dad finally saw it, she thought she was going insane cause we all half heartedly looked and didn’t see it.
The invisible pig v The imaginary cat… lol 
LOL – your poor mom!!! That is a funny story,
That’s great. Gotta be sharp for the Pythonators.
Yesterday I was on the phone having an obscure and frustrating conversation with the medical records department at my HMO. Finally it dawned on me that I was feeling a little faint.
I said to the lady, “You know what? I can’t have this conversation right now. I feel faint.” She was fine with getting the “crazy lady” off the phone. ;0)
I tested and it wasn’t bad, but I must have been dropping. I ate something and drank some water and about a half-hour later I felt SO much better. I think I was dropping and dehydrated.
I feel bad for the people who have to deal with me when I’m like that.