Wayback Wednesday – So Sleepy…

Courtesy of the “Wayback Machine“, I bring you the early entries I made in my online diabetes journal.  This was back before Blogger made things easy, and I had to write the entries in HTML.  The journal is no longer available, but thanks to the wonderful tools available on the internet, I was able to find much of my old stuff.  I’d like to share one of the old entries with you.

High blood sugars still make me tired.

27 May 2003

Blah! I feel like crap today. I woke up with a blood sugar of 390. That was at 8:00am. It’s now 11:22am, and It’s on it’s way down (356 at last check).

The hard thing about such high blood sugars for me, is that I get so incredibly sleepy. I mean SOOOOOOO sleepy. I could literally fall asleep on my feet. It is hard to stay awake while driving, walking, or anything else for that matter. Much less trying to be productive at work. It’s really tough.

Then, you also want to be careful about bringing your blood sugar down too fast. First of all, your body does not like blood sugars outside of it’s normal range (70-120). Second of all, nature does not change rapidly – so your body does not like rapid change either. It’s just not good.

You also have to be careful because it’s common to “over do it” on the insulin because you feel so crappy with your blood sugar so high. But, if you try to fix it too fast, you will feel even worse because you are changing your blood sugar so rapidly, and you will often end up with a low blood sugar from being so
aggressive!

Then, the low blood sugars cause all types of things to happen. Because a persons body normally never has a low blood sugar, the body goes into a panic when the blood sugar is low. Among many other things, it dumps a handful of hormones to try to counteract the low blood sugar. Among those are adrenaline, glucagon, cortisol and growth hormone. The last two, cortisol and growth hormone don’t impact the blood sugar until many hours later. At which time, you start having these high blood sugars that are hard to account for.

It’s a very complicated system, which works incredibly well – except if you’re diabetic.

That’s all for now…