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Could not feel my hypo yesterday at all, hypo unawareness?

F

Fatima_94

Member
Messages
18
Type of diabetes
Type 1
Greetings!

Yesterday night, I was about to go to bed without checking as I had checked it relatively recently. My sister brought my monitor and said I should check it anyway. I was feeling completely fine but the reading showed 3.2.. and then I tried again... 3.5... then again.. 2.8.. I kept checking because I literally couldnt feel it at all!

Usually, I can fully feel the impact of a low. Even if I don't notice it straight away, I always at least feel that something is off and I go shaky/weak/have palpitations/have no energy to move etc etc.. But yesterday I felt like I could go on as normal. As if my meter was lying to me?!

I'm very worried about hypo unawareness now. I think this may be happening to me? What does this mean, can it be reversed?

This may seem silly, but in a way I was kind of glad that I couldn't feel it for once. Is it really that bad? Why is it dangerous?
 
Hypos are scary but I think when you go low without noticing it is the most scary. I was once told that our brains do not work properly without a BG of 2.8mmol/l. So below this, we don't think clearly and may do something silly. I have read people on this forum ordering something stupid online when they were low. But this is nothing compared to what would happen if you were doing some which requires proper focus like driving or cooking.

There are multiple reasons why you may not have felt last night's low. For example, if you have had a few hypos recently, your body starts getting used to them so you feel them less. Or you may feel them more when you are walking around but less so when you are sitting still.

The good news is you can "retrain" your body. If you usually target to keep your BG at around 5.5, you could up your target a little to 6.0 for a month or so. As your body familiarises itself with the slightly higher BG, it will start to recognise hypos earlier. Then you can reduce your target back to normal again.
 
Speaking for myself the symptoms aren't always the same and are in some cases easy to ignore or not notice, sometimes my vision goes blurry, sometimes my heart rate increases, sometimes I lose my motor skills, sometimes I feel twitching in some muscles. Before I got my Libre, I would regularly ignore some of those things and every now and then just not function well until I inevitably had something to eat or drink and in some rare occasions actually enter a kind of dream-like state not being able to think straight.
 
That just happens sometimes. I tend to get a bit daft if I go below 5, but shortly after I discovered Candy Crush (evil time-vampire...) I was playing it on the bus, and felt nothing til I got off the bus and felt a bit shaky. Tested and my BG was 1.9. I had no idea my meter could measure that low! Of course once I knew I was hypo I started to feel it in a big way, I'm sure it has psychosomatic elements.
But try not to worry too much, hypo symptoms change all the time and sometimes you'll miss one - that's why we have BG meters
 

Very reassuring to know that the body can be retrained


This is definitely true for me too, so I guess I shouldn't panic too much unless it becomes a regular thing. Totally relate to the dream-like state feeling too!!


ahh that kind of shock low has happened to me a few times! you're totally right, its bound to happen sometimes
 
If a T1 goes gently low, aka by sitting down/sleeping, then many will not feel bad until having to move/get up. You typically actually don't feel bad until the point where you own body starts to counter react by releasing endorphins, glucose dump, etc and the bg is already on its way back up.

And by remaining in a quiet non-active state you can actually go pretty low without necessarily feeling bad at all.
Its not a competition or anything to be proud of, but I am sure we collectively on this forum could quote some pretty scary low bg numbers that we have gone through over the years.

All while we at the same time can feel really bad and go through the full rough 'hypo fever' despite at times not dropping further than down to e.g. 3 mmol/L. It typically all depends on your journey getting there!
A vertical drop from 12 to 3 in a short timeframe due to a fast acting insulin will often feel much worse and give all the hypo symptoms, while a slow drop from 4 to 2 over a period of hours due to too much basal insulin might not be apparent to you at all, if sitting e.g. reading a book the whole afternoon in a comfy chair.
 
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