Cool (uncool) consequences of diabetic hypoglycemia
Here's some stuff that can happen if your blood sugar is too low.
- Can't exercise good: you bike slowly, due to general weakness
- Can't stand up good: you become extremely weak and feel an overwhelming need to sit down. As a kid I would describe this as "my legs feel wiggly".
- Sweating: cold sweats, specifically.
- Can't wake up: if I have low blood sugar while asleep, I will sleep through all my alarms. Someone will need to find me and rescue me, basically. For this reason I have never in my life ever lived alone. I've always had, at the very least, a roommate.
- Feeling extremely confused: it gets hard to think. The first time I tried to write my post about swapping Pokemon into other versions of the game to eliminate your own fun, I became extremely confused and found myself writing huge paragraphs about things that didn't matter, and which I could not understand upon re-read. I had low blood sugar. I came back later with normal blood sugar and deleted like twelve paragraphs.
- Straight up blacking out: when I worked at a summer camp for kids with diabetes in high school and early college, there was a weeklong period after I started at the camp (I think it was in 2007? 2008?) where I was exercising too much and taking too much insulin. Two days in a row, I had catastrophically low blood sugar in the early afternoon. Both times this happened, my completely braindead husk of a body would walk itself over to my boss's office and sit down near her desk and eat a ton of candy. Self perservation, I guess. I am not sure why I went to my boss instead of the nurses. The second time I did this in a week, we changed my insulin doses on my pump and it didn't happen again.
- Hallucinating: when I was a kid I would hallucinate the wildest shit when I had low blood sugar. I used to hallucinate that I was trapped in some kind of lovecraftian underwater dimension filled with enormous sea creatures. I also used to hallucinate that I was climbing up a gigantic pyramid that went on forever. Each of these things would fill me with enormous dread. Once at GDC in 2016 or 2017 I hallucinated that someone I knew had had their eyes replaced by semicolons. It's pretty wild!
- Numbness: I can have numb limbs or a numb face!
- Getting extremely emotional: if I have low blood sugar late at night, I will without fail start thinking about what a piece of shit I am and how terrible everything is. You get the one-two punch of all your thoughts being bad due to not enough brain juice, and all your thoughts being bad due to it being nighttime, past the hour of the demon, when your opinions of yourself should be automatically discounted. If this happens to me during the day I'll just feel a vast and nameless horror, or start crying.
- Saying incoherent things which you do not remember later: if I have low enough blood sugar, I will begin to speak in word salad. I'll basically begin to talk like the guy from that classic fake-American-English music video from 1970s Italy. This has happened to me very rarely, and usually the person who is with me gets extremely frightened by it. If I'm ever with you and I start saying words that aren't words, having zero sugar in my blood is probably the main problem.
- Being afraid to tell people you have low blood sugar: I might become extremely terrified of social embarrassment all of a sudden. Too terrified, in fact, to tell anyone that I need medical attention. I usually get over it, but there's often a few minutes in the middle of the experience where my brain is spitting out sparks, trying to figure out whether it would be a faux pas to tell anyone that I feel like I am dying.
Anyway! That's a little vision into my brain. Now that I have a continuous glucose monitor, this type of shit rarely happens to me anymore. I get warning ahead of time that my blood sugar is going down, and I can take actions to avoid it.
The CGM is priceless, but it makes my "burn rate" very high. One of the reasons I want universal healthcare in the US is that this device is high cost for me, but is excellent preventative healthcare that avoids bigger costs for me and the state long-term. If only we had some kind of system where emergency-avoiding healthcare could be provided to everyone at zero cost... if only every diabetic could have this shit and avoid the emergency room entirely...
Once, I was leaving a CVS in west LA (with my insulin!) and found a guy passed out on the hood of my car. It turns out that this dude had diabetes and was passed out with hypoglycemia. The CVS employees and the cops they called all thought he was drunk, but he had some kind of medical alert bracelet on, and they realized it was a diabetes thing. If only he'd been hooked up with a CGM, he'd have been able to avoid whatever the fuck nasty experience led to him completely spreadeagled on my ancient Corolla. Just a thought!! This tech is pretty important!!!