Another scary low

It's late and I need to go to bed, but what a day!

We've had another interesting turn in Max's diabetes. We keep being told that this is all pretty normal in the beginning, all these little issues that come up. Here I thought that the beginning (the honeymoon period) was supposed to be the easy part but it hasn't seemed like it!

So basically Max has been running low for a few days. He would have at least one low a day (anything under 80) but the weird thing is that he would get his "low" after eating. Ok, this is very weird and very undiabetes-like! Honestly, if he hadn't had those crazy highs before diagnosis, I would be wondering if Max was truly diabetic afterall.

Usually, when we eat, our blood sugar goes up but our insulin kicks in to control it. For diabetics, of course, they need insulin, but it does take a little bit for it to kick in, so it's not unusual to see the blood sugar spike up in the 200s and then slowly come down.

Well, these past two days, Max has actually had a low after taking his insulin. He ate his lunch at school the other day, and his Dexcom beeped saying he was 72. He went to the nurse, who was baffled, because the blood sugar should have been going up, not down.

Then today, it happened again. About a half hour after lunch, he came upstairs saying his Dexcom was saying he was 68 and falling fast (with a downward arrow meaning falling.) I gave him a 4 oz juice box and it kept falling. Then Skittles, then another glass of juice. It fell all the way to 52 and that is when Max begins to get clammy and sweaty. We realized that his body is tolerant only until about the 50s and then it begins to get very uncomfortable for Max. When he's in the 40s, he becomes nauseas. He hasn't been lower than 40 so we don't know what would happen if he hit the 30s. Anyway, you get the idea, so it was very scary!

I got on the phone with the Children's Diabetes to see if they could help and as we were talking on the phone, Max's blood sugar SLOWLY came back up. It took forever. I finally sent him downstairs when he was 76, which is still technically low, but it was taking so long for it to come back up and he was feeling a lot better, so I let him go but told him to come back if it began to drop again.

Anyway, the nurses changed his Basal (long-acting insulin) down to two units and then his bolus insulin another two units down. So altogether, he should be taking four units less of insulin. Let's hope that does the trick!

They said his body is "honeymooning", which means that it is producing more insulin than normal, causing him to "over-dose" himself. The problem is, we never know how much his body is going to produce, so it's a guessing game. It could go back to just trickling or it could go back to spurting, which is what it was doing for the past few days.

Honestly, these lows scare me and it took a lot for me to not let Max see how scared I was. My hands were shaking and every so often I thought I was going to lose it. Not seeing his blood sugar come back up after all that juice and sugar and just see it continue to plummet, I can't even explain it. You feel so helpless. I was between trying to figure out if I should call 911 or give him the emergency glucogon. They say you get used to this sort of thing, but I don't see how.