there is nothing i dislike more about this disease than waking up in the middle of the night low. it frustrates me to no end. i always have a dream before i wake up that i’m out somewhere and i go low. in my dream i end up panicking because i never have something to treat the low. i’m guessing the panic feeling is what wakes me up. when i wake up low i tend to feel 10 times worse even though my bs isn’t necessarily that low. i treat it. if i go back to sleep before i feel better i end up waking up with the biggest headache that i have all day. no amount of tylenol gets rid of the headache. i also sleep really restless and have crazy off the wall dreams afterwords. once again, it frustrates me. does anyone else have similar feelings and responses to waking up low??
oh i LOATHE waking up low. And yes it usually gives me a headache that stays all day long. A few times I’ve woken up and mechanically treated a low without even knowing it. I’m not even conscious of what I’m doing until suddenly I taste cookies in my mouth and I’m sitting on the floor in front of a TV I don’t remember turning on with crumbs all over the floor.
I guess it’s good that my body knows what to do even when I’m not aware? haha.
So frustrating!
i often find myself on the couch eating not really knowing how i got there also. i don’t remember waking up and walking to the kitchen sometimes.
i badly want to eat everything in the fridge too. i feel lower and my appetite intensifies even more that when i just go low during the day. in fact i often times over treat overnight lows 
I always have dreams that I’m low, and then I wake up really low! And the worst part is I just want to go back to sleep so I over eat and then end up waking up really high. SUCKS.
When I wake up after a night low it usually with my wife standing over me with the “angry face” saying, “eat this”. She is always feeding me sugared up OJ and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. So I always have a rebound problem but she can get back to bed without having to worry about me going low again. Sometimes i seizure and othertimes I just lay there sweating, I don’t notice a thing. Darn good she does.
Most often I go low enough that my liver is kicking out enough glucagon to bring a horse around. Of course that makes the rebound worse. And the headache I thought was because of the seizure, but maybe not.
Amanda could your sugar already have recovered because of your bodies glucagon? I don’t know at what point it kicks the stuff out, I just know it really goes to town during a seizure.
i used to have a problem with lows while i’m sleeping, i think it was because i was eating and taking humalog so close to a dosage of lantus. Anyway my doc said i could 1) split it 2) take it during the day (no more advice after that, i’m getting a new doc). Currently i take it in the afternoon, it’s helped me not oversleep so much. I work 3rd shift so i was taking lantus at 8 a.m. before bed, now i take it at 5 p.m. So far so good…I also tend to keep on sleeping when i’m low, then sleeping and more sleeping. I hate it it was depressing me to sleep my day away so much. (doc said she wanted to increase my lantus, i was way to scared). I can’t eat skittles! I want to eat a million of them. Usually if i want to go back to sleep i’ll wait for my the carbs to “calm” my body back down from the edge of insanity that is a low! Now when i dream… i usually treat my low in my dream!! But then i wake up and realize i have no delicious choco chip cookie.
i wake up low in the morning. but actually getting out of bed to get something is a whole other story.
Being low anytime is a horrible feeling, like when I’ve worked hard physically and have failed to remember to eat something. You know, you get really into what you’re doing, and you might sense a little bit of lowness, but when it heads a lot lower, it becomes a terrible experience. The bad thing for me is that when I’ve been low (which isn’t that much now) my mind doesn’t seem to work right. One time, my wife told me I’d better go get something to eat because I was acting strange. I insisted I was fine, because my mind was just not working on all cylinders. Debbie took a banana, peeled part of it, and forced it into my mouth. That worked. As for waking up low, it has happened to me, but I generally get a sweaty feeling on my body, and it’s like my body is telling me “Wake up!” I quickly test my bs, even if I’m shaking, and take the appropriate amount of food to cover the low. Sometimes in the past, I have just gorged on food to cover the low, without testing, and that tended to send my bs completely too high. We live and learn. The headache you get sounds awful. I’m sorry you get that kind of a reaction.
I do dream all the time about eating great stuff. I have only been dreaming about food since I have become diabetic. They say that if you dream about jogging, it is as good as doing the real exercise. Maybe dreaming about eating is just as good as really eating and raising my BS levels.
I use to love waking up low in the middle of the night. I would wake up starving and go raid the fridge where my wife always had brownies, cookies, cake, ice cream etc. I always over-corrected and I knew I was doing it at the time but I didn’t care because the food I was eating never tasted so good as it did then (and I was too groggy to think straight about the consequences). It’s the next morning that always sucked. I’d wake up with my numbers through the roof and exhausted since I don’t sleep well at all high.
What I hated was when I didn’t wake up with the low, but it didn’t get low enough to send me into a coma or anything. In fact, for about a week before I woke up in an ambulance I was waking up at my normal time and I was too low to know. I called it waking up crazy because that’s exactly what it felt like. It was like I had no control over my brain and nothing made sense. One morning it almost became dangerous for me and others because I woke up, grabbed my car keys, and decided to go for a drive and run some people over. I remember thinking that if the police come after me I’ll just set the car into fly mode and fly away. The first thing that stopped me was that I stubbed my toe pretty hard on the way to the car, the second thing was my wife who convinced me to drink a glass of orange juice before I go anywhere. Needless to say by the time I was done convincing her that I wasn’t low and the car could actually fly the OJ had kicked in and made me realize what I was saying.
my morning high after going low could very well be from my body’s glucagon. there have been times i only eat 20 carbs around 4am and end up in the 300’s around 8am. it sucks.
Geez Pavlos, sure you were just low ? Only kiddin’ Yeah I get you on that strange ravenous hunger that comes with a nightime low, weird innit. I do hate going low at night for the exact same reason, payback time in the morning. I still tend to overcompensate for hypo’s at night. The headaces the next day are bad too. I don’t like the hypo nightmares, but I reckon the DKA ones are worse.
Talk about DREAMS! CRAZY ones! I no longer go low, but I learned to treat with only 3 half-Dex4 (6 grams) instead of 15 grams. Six grams boosts me 40 mg/dl. I could grab them without opening my eyes. Then I would count my breathing. It took about 10 breaths and I must have been back to a decent sleep. Thank goodness I never tried to go to the frig.
Just a half unit less Lantus in the evening stopped me from waking up like that. It was disgusting. And everyone told me that there would be no peak with Lantus. Ho. HO!
I will never forget the dream-situations I was trying to resolve - always fantasy environment with fantasy people, flying in fantasy helicopters & speedy fighters with insufficient fuel onboard.
Freud, get the Freud out, well I prefer Kant. They say when you figure your dreams out they will stop well the repetitive ones anyway. I figured out one which I had for about 10yrs but I still get this other one dunno what it’s about.
my dreams always have people i know in them and they are always soo incredibly realistic it isn’t funny. we are usually just doing day to day things that we would do if we were together, then i go low in the dream. it just amazes me how realistic they are!!
I wish I would wake up to a low before I’m already at 40 or below. It is damn scary. I am going to look into a “diabetes guide dog” that are trained to sense lows and alert the person to impending problems. I have worn a monitor and I sleep through the alarm. Not much help there, huh?
sounds like we need to ask the companies to make these alarms louder
Here’s my story - when I was first diagnosed, my doctor put me on WAY too much lantus. I was taking 16 units of lantus a day; i realized it was too high after a couple weeks, and i started lowering it. i got all the way down to three. that doctor did nothing for me, cheers to the internet.
anyway, i woke up in the middle of the night with lows all of the time. it was terrible, especially since these were my very first lows. it is extremely confusing to wake up with a low, when you don’t know what a low feels like. one time, i woke up and thought ‘why do i feel so funny’ - laid there for ten minutes. then i always ate a snack before bed.
anyway, got on the low carb low insulin deal, havent woken up in the night with a low since. gotta try not to take that for granted.
i’m glad you got everything all figured out with that!! i can’t imagine my first lows ever being overnight. that would be scary!!