Blood sugar drop

spurs101 said:

Hi, new to all of this. I tested my blood sugar around 9am. It was 11.2 ( had a bad night of eating) I then had 3 boiled eggs for breakfast. Tested again at 11am. It was 2.2?

As i'm new to checking, is that normal that it can fluctuate that much?

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Hi and welcome.

I think you might have had a rogue result. If you were genuinely at 2.2 mmol/l - which if accurate is definitely a low reading - you would almost certainly be having some hypoglycaemic problems. Are you otherwise feeling OK?

3 boiled eggs (if eaten alone without toast etc) shouldn't affect your BG directly, as they have no carb worth talking of. The other factor is your liver which will adjust blood glucose up and down all the time in response to what you need, or at any rate what your liver thinks you need. Blood glucose can vary quite sharply over a couple of hours, and if you'd said 11.2 to (eg) 5.5 or 6.0 after two hours that shows some effective insulin activity.

The 11.2 in the morning is down to your liver, probably. It adds glucose from stores to your/our systems all the time. If you've had high blood glucose for a while, the liver thinks of that as normal and will attempt to keep you where you are. Similarly with habitual low blood glucose, the liver will accept that as normal and to be maintained.

spurs101 said:

thanks all. I did panic a bit. Had a satsuma and an apple just in case but I was feeling fine.

I seen the replies, washed hands and tested again. Was 4.9.

Completely new to it all. Had a HBA1C of 81 last month and it frightened me a bit. I've been attempting to eat a lot better which after years of abusing my body has not been easy. I will test HBA1C again in a few months but got a finger prick monitor as I was interested to see what it was saying on a daily basis.

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That's good. Meters have an allowable inaccuracy of 5%, 95% of the time - so a true value of 5 mmol/l could be given as anything in the approximate range 4.7 to 5.3. Don't get hung up on small differences.

I'd recommend keeping a diary of your test results and times for testing along with food eaten and any other relevant factors - eg exercise, illness, stres etc. The usual pattern is to test immediately before eating to establish a baseline, and then test again two hours later. You're not testing to see how high you go.

The second test result should therefore be showing you how well (or otherwise) your system worked in returning you to where you started from. A rise in blood glucose is perfectly normal and to be expected after eating carb, even in small quantity, for both diabetics and non-diabetics. What should be happening is that at the two hour mark your insulin response should have cleared away most if not all of the glucose produced (into muscle, liver, or fat storage), so you should be close to where you started from. The target is usually to be a) within 2mmol/l of the starting value and b) not above 8.5 (I use 7.8, the non-diabetic target myself).

I know from using a constant glucose monitor that one small latte will take me from 5.2 starting to 9.6 30 minutes after drinking it - but I'll be back to 5.2 by 60 minutes. As long as your system can deal with the glucose level, you're on the right track.

This forum has helped me a lot, and still continues to provide useful support and information. Read around a bit - have a look at the Success Stories section - and ask as many questions as you want.

I’m someone who suffers with hypos. D2 is about high Blood sugar. Low blood sugar events are not, in general, a D2 symptom.
Unless you are on blood lowering medications.
Some none diabetic medications can cause hypos as well.
Alcohol consumption may have an effect on blood sugars and can cause lows several hours after consumption. I have stopped drinking alcohol because drinking made my lows far worse. I could and do drop into the low 2’s with all hypo symptoms.
Reactive hypoglycaemia is another one. The body produces an excess of insulin on its second phase insulin release. There are two phases of insulin release when you eat. The first phase release is a quick release of insulin, drawn from a pre-existing reservoir. This first phase commences within 10 to 15 minutes on consuming food and lasts only minutes. Your second phase insulin is produced and secreted in the pancreas until your blood sugars reach homeostasis. You will secrete insulin until this has been achieved. Most Type 2 diabetics have lost the first phase insulin release and rely on the second phase to bring their blood sugars down. There is a highly sensitive process that takes place involving signalling between the pancreas and the liver.
Other things that can go off involve depleted glycogen reserves in the liver. The liver plays a key role in keeping our blood sugars in homeostasis. When your blood sugars start dropping, your liver releases or dumps glucose from these glycogen stores. If these stores are depleted this fails to happen or your liver is slow to correct Your falling blood sugars. Heavy exercise can impact your glycogen stores; not enough nutrients can impact these stores, especially if you haven’t eaten and you are doing something that requires energy. Many people can go low at night, but in general these night time lows are corrected by the liver.
Fasting may also impact your glycogen stores.

And lastly, already mentioned above, glucose meters have an accepted margin of error. This is trues, especially for continuous glucose monitors, and should always be cross checked with a glucose meter when your CGM reads low or high.