Today, I am going to describe the scary nights. Ones like last night and the night before.
It starts with being jerked awake, feeling utterly disoriented. Then I am grumpy because why am I awake in the middle of the flipping night? Next is that feeling. It feels as though I were being zapped by low current electric wires all over, I'm jittery and cant concentrate. By instinct, I know I am low. I've felt it hundreds, literally hundreds of times before. I fumble for my phone to shut off the Dexcom alerting to my low glucose level and feel the other fun parts of hypoglycemia- the sweat. I am soaked head to toe, my hair is as though I just stepped from the shower, my pajamas are sticking to me, as though I just ran a marathon in Louisiana, next to a bayou, in August. My hand gropes in the dark on my headboard shelf for a juice box, failing to be quiet in a vain attempt to not wake my husband. He awakens enough to ask if I need help, something he can do while mostly still asleep as he has helped save me many times over our nearly nine years of marriage.
I mumble out "lowww" and finally stab the straw through the hole in the top of the Hi-C, pull the straw out and pound back the sugary drink as though I were a frat boy at a raging kegger. Once it's downed, I am still shaking badly, but I get up and strip, grab a towel from my bathroom and dry off, dress in clean nightclothes, crawl back between the sheets and drift off. Sometimes I start to feel my bg rising again and am safe to sleep, while other times I over-eat for the low, causing my bg to spike too high. Fear can do that. Fear has caused me to overtreat many times in the night, especially when my husband is away for work.
These lows are scary to say the least. They're also irritating because it means broken sleep, sugar ingested after teeth being brushed and I never remember to brush after a low because I am TIRED, and I can die.
So very many Type 1s have lost their lives from slipping into a coma and dying from low blood sugar. This can and does kill. The brain needs sugar to work. The glucose in our blood travels to our brain, and the cells take is from the blood and use it. The brain does not store glucose, so when the glucose levels in the blood go low, the brain gets "first dibs" on nutrients in blood, so the other organs lose out in a hypoglycemic episode. The muscles don't want to work well, which makes it difficult to function to treat the low. Once the glucose levels fall too low, the brain has no fuel from the glucose, and it too, shuts down. We lose consciousness, then we stop breathing, and we die.
I use a Dexcom continuous glucose monitor. It is a medical device that uses a sensor with a tiny metal filament inserted at an angle under my skin to read the glucose levels every 5 minutes. A transmitter is attached to the sensor and uses Bluetooth to send the information to a receiver. I use my phone with its compatible app as mine. This technology has helped my husband and myself save my life often in the year and a half since I began wearing it.
I appreciate the tech that I use to stay alive. I affectionately call them my Borg implants. Without them, my health was out of control and I was slowly dying. Now, I'm happily living and fighting like hell to stay that way.
No comments:
Post a Comment