There is something very physical about how it feels to have a high blood sugar. Or a low one.
The pasty mouth and bizarre headache of a high blood sugar and the heart-palpitating, tingly-lipped cold sweat of a low are hard to explain and, I would argue, impossible for someone to understand unless they feel it for themselves.
There is also something quite non-physical about highs and lows. Something, dare I say it, akin to jumping on a bandwagon.
Take a low blood sugar for example.
My body is pretty good at giving me signals when my blood sugar is low or when it is dropping. Sometimes though, it doesn't.
Or perhaps it does and I just don't notice.
Either way, there are times when I feel perfectly fine until Dexter starts buzzing or until I do a random blood sugar check and see the number 2.2 staring back at me.
In less time than it takes me to process that number, my body goes from feeling fine to being attacked by a full blown, sweaty, shaky, blurred vision low.
It's like my glucometer decided I was low and then my body decided to jump on the bandwagon.
Or the other night when Doug and I had pizza for dinner when we were out at an event. I pre-bolused like a good pizza eater and after about 20 minutes, I had my pizza.
Not long after that Dexter, who had only recently been changed and was still having trouble getting his calibration act together, started screaming that I was over 10 and climbing fast. Within 20 minutes he told me that I was 13 and fifteen minutes later I was apparently 16.
I sat through the rest of the meeting feeling more and more like a bag of dirt and was grateful when we finally left and were able to head home. My head ached, my teeth hurt and I felt so dehydrated I couldn't wait to guzzle a huge glass of water.
When we got home I pulled out my glucometer and tested. It told me I was 8.2. Not 16.
I checked again just to be sure and was told I was 7.7.
So apparently I had calculated my dinner correctly and Dexter just needed to get his act together.
Guess what happened?
Yep. I immediately felt better once I saw that I was not high after all. All the high symptoms miraculously disappeared.
Did my body jump on the high blood sugar bandwagon or did I really truly feel all of those high symptoms?
Diabetes.
Sometimes I think it's all in my head.
This is really interesting. Avery definitely has a set of expectations around blood sugars, and is heavily influenced, mentally, by her fear of lows. We've realized a few patterns, for example that in the late evenings right before she goes to sleep, she often feels very low. We test, and find she is 10 or 12. She gets confused between 'low' and 'overtired'. It's a little unnerving for her to not be able to tell the difference at that time of day.
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