WWTBAM Bored

For reasons I won't go into, I forgot to take my morning diabetes meds. I am allowed to go without if I'm undergoing medical procedures that forbid them. Or if I'm fasting (in my case this would be Yom Kippur only) I skip the glipizide, which stimulates the pancreas to produce insulin, & take the metformin, which is said to mimic an enzyme which stops your liver from turning starch into glucose. Hard to take without water, but I've done it.

Yesterday I just plain missed the dose. Didn't figure it out until night time dose time. This isn't stuff you should double up on, as it could kick your blood sugar dangerously low. At the worst time, at night, when you aren't awake to goose it up with sugary things. My sugar has been high for no reason various mornings, so I was afraid it would be today, but while high it wasn't horribly so.

Took my regular dose this morning, & ate some stuff that's not strictly on a diabetic diet (popover from a store in the square that make them; yum). Ate plenty other stuff that is not diabetic diet stuff, like chestnuts & blueberries (oh, I could live on blueberries; now that we have those Argentinian ones in winter, even though they're probably grown with unG-dly doses of bad chemicals, as Argentina has no laws in this regard, I might just live on them year round, or at least as long as TJ's sells them at $7.00/18oz).


But at 3:00pm today felt woozy & lightheaded & checked my blood sugar & it was 47. At 47, my 87-year-old Mom was losing consciousness & had to have the EMTs transfuse her with glucose, even after she'd been fed sugary stuff. She was the victim of "recuperation home" cretins who wanted to get her blood sugar down, so had upped the dose of glimiperide, which stimulates the pancreas, without our permission.


But at 47 I am walking around, feeling chancy. This has happened to me before. I had already eaten my emergency candy, crystalized ginger, earlier, so I took it as a license to have a piece of pizza & when that didn't make me feel much better quickly enough, I went to a local ice cream store for what you have to in New England call a float instead of an ice cream soda or you won't get what you want. Did the trick. After that, my blood sugar was 115. Under normal circumstances, after an ice cream soda (NE float) my blood sugar would be so high you don't wanna know.


I don't know what is going on, though. I've been gaining a little weight, which is not good, but if my pancreas has suddenly come back to life a few extra pounds would be well worth it.


The reading tomorrow morning will be interesting. Usually, a panic-inducing reading of 160 & above; its been as high as 220 is followed, after some normal morning activity of a reading as low as 120. But not always.

I'm not a doctor and I have no idea what's going on, but take care of yourself!

So the moral of the story is: Skip your meds and get ice cream!

47 is a seriously low number. You can't be messing around with that. If missing just one dose can do that to you, then you need to really make sure you are checking sugar on a regular basis.

I must be 'lucky' with my diabetes. I've skipped my metformin many times with no serious effects. I also rarely have to check my glucose levels as I've learned to feel when my levels are low or high. I will add though that I'll use a low blood sugar event as a nice excuse to eat something that I don't usually get to have (gotta love dem carbs!). When I race, I burn up so many calories so quickly that I can eat whatever I want.

All the more mysterious as missing meds should have made my sugars go up, not down. My body is trying to regulate itself, which it supposedly can't do now that I'm diabetic, but from time to time it does this all too well. I know frighteningly low readings are far more potentially deadly than the occasional high morning readings I fret so about.


I check my sugar far too often, my doctor says. But the nurse who my insurance has call diabetics periodically says I need to tell the doc about the occasional scarily low readings, & I agree. If they lower my meds, my A1C will go up. But that's better than "dead".

I'm pretty sure that the missed meds / low sugar thing is a short-term consequence. The bodies way of reacting to the change from what was normal. I can't see dropping down the meds although it's very possible that they will put you on something else. Metformin is usually the best, first step in fighting this but diabetes is prone to change over time - and treatment with it.

Metformin is good for so many conditions besides diabetes that that nurse says someone important thinks it should be put in the water. (Don't the rest of you worry, the person who would like this doesn't have that authority.)

Its unlikely that I'll ever be off Metformin. My unrealistic aim is to be on at least a lower dose of glipizide some day.

happenned again today (low sugar, not missed meds the day before), but I was not able to get to ice-cream store, so sugar picker-upper had to be 2 Reese's cups packages from a candy machine (this was absolutely the best choice from a candy machine as its something I actually liked in my former life. Hurts to be eating candy you don't like just for the sugar!). Followed by a kind of boring rice bowl from a food truck. I may stop by the ice-cream store in a bit anyway.

Could be that you need to up the amount of carbs that you take in on a regular basis - either that or increase the number or size of your between meal snacks.