Difficult Situations Made More Difficult

As most of you know, a low sugar episode from having Type 1 can cause any symptom you can imagine from sweats, confusion, irritability, or fatigue, to the term that was used this morning by my groggy husband, “wigging out”. It’s always different in each episode. You never know what you are going to get. Now, if you look at the side effects from the strong Neuropathy medications Vince is on, a lot of the symptoms are very similar, fatigue or extreme drowsiness being the most dominant.

Now let me set the scene from earlier this morning:

4:00AM                Our cat wakes me up to let me know Vince is asleep on the couch and he may need help (yes, she actually comes to get me when she thinks he might need help) I go out to the living room to find Vince passed out on the couch. I wake him up and coax him to stand on his feet. I think I may have tested his BG too but I forget since I was half asleep. Once he got on his feet, he went to the kitchen to have two popsicles since he was on the low/normal BG line according to the CGM. He came to bed around 4:30 and was snoring before he hit the pillow. I fell back to sleep around 4:45 or 5:00AM

7:00AM                I am awoken by the CGM alerting to a low, along with my alarm clock. I snooze the alarm and ignore the low alarm figuring he would be fine for ten more minutes. I can usually predict when the CGM is giving a false reading. Don’t ask how, I guess it’s a 6^th sense. Kind of like when I could sense he was low before anyone else including himself before the days of CGM. Anyway, 10 minutes later, my alarm clock goes off again so I get up. I hear his low alarm again so I take a look. 46 is on the screen. CRAP. It’s not usually off by this many points, so he must be low. I quickly grab his meter, expecting a nasty result and what I get instead was 106. Whew, not 46. Good. Calibrate and move on. I start to get ready for work. The low alarm keeps going off but I ignore it.

7:55AM                I am about to leave to go to job #1 of 2 for the day and as I am about to leave the bedroom, he starts to sit up in bed and talk gibberish. First thing in my head was, “he’s low”. I rush over and try to talk to him to see if it is a real low or just medicated drowsiness. I test his BG one more time since this time it says 40 on the CGM. Again, it’s normally very close to his actual BG so being this far off was odd. Fingerstick, and 96 appears. I take his head in my hands and have him look at me and raised my voice to get him to snap out of whatever was going on. “You’re not low, your 96. What’s wrong? Why are you talking crazy? Wake up. Look at me.” He then says, “Check my BG” I said, “I already did. Your 96. Look me in the eye. What is wrong? You’re not low.” He then snaps out of it and says, “I’m not low, why am I “wigging out”? I asked him if he was tired. He said yes. That must be it. I told him to lay down and go to sleep. He falls to his side in bed and after I nudge him toward the middle of the bed so he didn’t fall off, I say again, loudly, “you okay now?” He said “yeah” and I leave for work.

So is it a low or a medication issue? Not always easy to tell. The lows I can deal with nowadays. A medication issue? Not so much. I have called 911 in the past because I wasn’t sure which it was. Turned out that time it was a little of both. One day I hope the neuropathy settles so that things will be a little easier…