Hi
@springerhockman, Such an unpleasant experience for your daughter and such a worry for you.! And i can remember some of my early-on hypos and how embarrassing they can be !!
As a T1D with more years on insulin than I care to think about !, but not as professional advice or opinion:
Yes,
I have been nauseated after a hypo and others have told me the same. Not every time but with the more severe ones.
That makes it tricky if I feel sick when someone is trying to get me to eat some sugar. And I can feel washed out and sick the next day also.
Glucose tablets or gel seem to work best (and rot the teeth less in the long term )!
There is an injection on prescription called glucagon which can be prepared (powder in a syringe, add water from an ampoule and inject under skin or in muscle, according to the instructions. Glucagon stimulates the liver to release stored glucose so the the poor brain has its fuel supply back !! It is handy too if the person is vomiting or unable to swallow.
BUT glucagon does not work well if the person has had alcohol, just so you know and your daughter is made very aware of this.
Of course by the time glucagon might be needed the person is unlikely to be unable to inject the glucagon themselves, Usually a caring and with-it doctor will suggest that
family members and one or two good friends learn have to prepare and give it.
The other part of hypos is trying to work out why they happen and how to prevent them happening in future.
If you look at the Home page with your daughter (she has to take this task on) - and click on 'Type 1 diabetes' on the left side of the horizontal menu bar - and way down near the bottom of the column is hypoglycaemia (hypo = low, gly = glucose, -aemia = in the blood). There is the definition for hypoglycaemia or 'hypo' as we say, (and you multiply the mmol/l BSL by 18 to get your mg/100 dl) e.g. 4 mol/l = 72 mg/dl, and a list of causes etc.
So depending what insulin regime your daughter, (yeah, hi, I hope you are reading this too, you can do this and make your life better, or suck less!!!) is prescribed, delaying a meal beyond its usual timing may allow the BSL to drop too far, or not eating the usual amount of food at a meal, exercise may cause a BSL drop soon after or many hours after or if in fact the insulin dose and doses may be such that hypos may happen too easily. If a hypo happens often at a particular time it may be possible to work out if it is when a particular insulin is reaching its peak effect, or it may be that the meal before that time is not sufficient or that it fits with exercise undertaken some hours before. Also in the honeymoon phase the little amount of insulin that is still able to be released by the pancreas might work unpredictably, sometimes releasing insulin so that the BSL drops further and at other times deciding to 'go on strike'!!
Whilst we on site cannot provide medical advice or opinion, if your daughter and you wish to provide some details about insulin type, frequency and doses we can direct you both to information about those particular insulins' profiles ( graphs) of each one's BSL-lowering activity to help you both. Also some continuous glucose monitoring(CGM) devices exist and people have linked alarms up via apps on their mobile phones to alert them to BSL levels before they get too low. One person has even linked it up the alarm to his speakers in the car !!
Hypos are a risk for driving also. And sometimes if, for whatever reason, one's BSLs are not under the best control you can lose some of the early-warning signs of a hypo. The once sweating, rapid heart beat, pallor signs may not show and the first signs are the confusion, unsteadiness etc,
Sometimes this hypo unawareness or the occurrences of severe hypos despite best efforts to avoid them is reason to consider the use of an insulin pump.
Night time hypos are the worse in my experience, because one is asleep and may miss the early signs of the hypo.
I hope the above helps you both. Please read, and use your health team, nurse, doctor to try to figure out what is happening, why and what to do about it !!
It may be too early for this next suggestion but just to know of some another approach to diabetes in general, read the book or e-book 'Dr Berstein's Diabetes Solution'.
Best Wishes for you both, mother and daughter. Here is to less hypos, less severe ones and the bestest control to enable life to be easier, more predictable and better job-wise!!
......It is all about balance !!
...........
