I absolutely hate getting those awful lows that seem to take forever to come up. Seems like nothing wants to bring it up and then when it finally decides to come up it takes forever. Nothing like dropping into the 30's and it taking two hours to get back into the 70's. Gotta love diabetes.
Kels, Have you ever tried suspending the pump if you are very low? If I am in the 30's or even low 40's , I will treat first, then suspend the pump for 30 to 40 minutes, depending on how many grams of carbs I have eaten AND HOW MUCH IOB(insulin on board, active insulin) in my system what is "forever" to you in terms of glucose range recovery?IN MY SYSTEM. wHAT IS FORVER?I may take up to 40 minutes to get up to 70, but it is usually not that long a time. As long as I am not dropping, I do not fret. Makes it difficult if I am trying to get to an appointmentt on time. the low blood sugar fog makes me think that I must straighten out the sock and panty hose drawer rather than find my purse and keys to place by the door while I am waiting for the return to normalcy.( lol)
God bless,
Brunetta
I had one like that about 3-4 weeks ago which really scared me- I started to feel very ill, my bg would go up and then start dropping and just kept dropping- the glucose wasn't getting into me. I thought I would need glucagon or an ambulance. Definitely suspend your pump if that happens. 2 hours is a long time. I think mine started to respond at 40 minutes or so and after 100g of sugar. But then I went to 250 or so and took a while to come down.
I agree turning down the basal (I use 7%, because it's "lucky", sometimes 13%...) can help boost BG out of lows although I'd recommend being careful with this as sometimes it will make my BG fly up if I'm overthinking the low. I also will skew my treatment towards something that works faster when I'm that low.
I usually have a mix of Smarties and jellybeans on hand but, since the Smarties are dextrose that works faster than HFCS, I will skew towards them when I'm really low. One other thing that can provide a free boost is, perhaps counter-intuitively, is anaerobic exercise, something like squats or pushups or sprints (I've done this when I've drifted low running, run a couple of fast intervals, like as fast as I can go...) which is not always convenient but pushups are pretty compact and can provide some hormones to help crank up your BG.
More broadly, is your basal perhaps cranked up too high? I have done that for years and just nudged my BG up with jelly beans but recently did a test, trying two different rates, .8U seems to be a whiff too much, as I get lots of lows but .775U/hour isn't enough as my BG will drift up at that rate. Occasionally I've also done "boosted" BG around meals which will also help keep things flat but it's sort of faked as that's like boosting your carb/insulin ratio with a basal boost and seems to complicate things more. What I finally tried recently was to go through and, except for the AM basal boost to cover DP, programmed .8U and .775U in 1/2 hour intervals to fake out a .7875U/ hour rate and it seems, perhaps eerily, to work really will. I still have a bit of crashing at dinnertime for some reason but other than tweaking that a bit, it seems to be working great. If your basal is hot, that might be making it harder to pull out of lows and dialing it back might help?
Good luck with whatever you decide to try!