This morning I woke up to hear the rain streaming steadily down my bedroom window. My heart was beating fast and I could feel my legs shaking. I was hungry, but nauseated too. Classic low sugar symptoms for me.
As I fumbled in the dark for one of the juice boxes next to my bed for moments like this, I could hear my husband starting to teach his first class of the day. Downing the juice, I gave it a moment to work before heading downstairs. As I tiptoed through the house, I could hear him already joking with the students and I felt a tear come to my eye.
Last night was hellacious. My blood sugar had started to rise around 7 PM, and I dosed myself with the correct amount of insulin to bring it back down. I took all my medicines on time and hydrated. Hydration is crucial when dealing with high blood sugar as higher numbers essentially rob you of the water in your body and convert your blood to be more acidic as sugar continues to leak into your bloodstream.
I went through probably 7-8 bottles of GatoradeZero (no sugar/carbs), a few cans of diet Ginger Ale, water, and about 30 carb-free popsicles. Despite repeated boluses of insulin and the truckloads of fluids, my sugar kept creeping up. Since my insulin site was a little old and ready to be changed soon, I changed that, hoping that maybe that was the problem. I also corrected using a shot, just in case the cannula of my old and new sites was bent, just to get things moving in the right direction. I went to the bathroom to check if I had any ketones in my urine, a classic way to determine if the blood is becoming acidic. Yup, they were there alright, but not so many that we needed medical help yet. Blood sugar continued to go up.
Since every new bolus of insulin does not fully work for three hours, this was a long process of trial and error to try and figure out what was going wrong. Finally we changed my site again with new insulin (the bottle we had been using had been working fine until hours before and had just been opened, so likely was not the culprit). Within an hour, my blood sugar began to plummet. This was around 3:30 AM-about eight hours after we started.
This was a new (potentially good?) problem to be dealing with. We needed to make sure that my blood sugar came down at the right rate to get me back into normal limits. Think of it like landing an airplane...you want it to come down kind of quickly at first to get the ball rolling (you know, so you aren't stuck doing circles over O'Hare forever), but then ease slowly to a steady, flat number for the landing. This looked like our plane might end up in center of the earth. Having fought with the high sugar for so long, I was incredibly tired and depleted. My husband told me to close my eyes for a minute and that he would watch my sugar over the next hour to figure out the trajectory. I never like keeping Alex up late because of my sugar or other medical issues. He never complains. He reminds me it is harder on my body than his...he is really the embodiment of patience and efficiency.
So knowing that he needed to be online and ready to teach this morning, I tried to argue for just setting an alarm...and promptly fell asleep.
Coming down the stairs this morning, I heard his enthusiastic voice addressing his first bell class and asking how the students were feeling. He introduced their new novel,To Kill a Mockingbird, and began his intentional lesson on racial discrimination and the raw, authenticity of the book. I sat down on the stairs, out of sight, but just wanting to keep listening, as he talked about the classroom being a safe space to feel unease with the language of the book. A safe space to discuss and learn from one another.
As I listened, I checked my continuous glucose monitor and saw that my blood sugar, while very slightly low, had leveled off right on the landing strip and thought to myself what good hands these kids were into have my husband making a safe space for them.
Prepare, don't panic.
-Allison
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