Friday, December 19, 2008

How low can you go?

Low blood sugar is a part of the Type 1 Diabetes game. The tighter the control, the more risk there is to go low. Some Type 1 diabetics can feel their lows while others cannot. Adele is somewhere in between. She sometimes feels her lows and sometimes she doesn't. It all depends on what she's doing at that time. She never wakes up when she goes low during the night. For this reason, we get up at least once every single night between 1 and 3 am to check her blood sugar. We want Adele to still be alive come morning.

A few months ago, Adele went quite low (below 1.0). We're still not sure how low she was because her glucose meter can't give an exact reading when blood sugar is below 1.0. The meter just indicates LO. Nothing had ever created immediate fear and panic in me and my wife as much as seeing this on Adele's meter (it has only happened this once). Luckily we managed to get Adele to drink a juice and eat. We caught her just in time and avoided having to give her a Glucagon injection. I still can't see that she was still sitting and talking to her friend with such low blood sugar. Had we not tested her sugar when we did she would have become unconscious and if there would have been no one there to help her, she would have died. Very, very scary part of the Type 1 game.

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