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Terrible hypo due to Lantus or steroids?

enzina

Well-Known Member
Messages
289
Location
London
Type of diabetes
LADA
Treatment type
Insulin
Dislikes
pain, being dependent, egoistic people & jealousy
I have spent the whole morning trying to get out of a massive hypo after i had injected 18 units of Lantus. Waking levels at 6am were 4.2 and after 30 minutes of being up i took the Lantus. Ten minutes later I was just picking up something from the floor when i noticed i'm feeling dizzy and can hardly see. Libre 2 showed 3.5 but finger pricking showed 1.9. It took me nearly two hours to bring the levels back up to normal although i was taking in incredible amounts of sugar and also ate bread and fruits.
Two weeks ago i got a steroid injection in my elbow. For the next two days afterwards i was running low, then very high and needed more insulin. Only since yesterday i thought everything is back to normal.
At the moment i'm feeling very weak, are walking like drunk and fingers and toes are cramping. Never had a hypo like that before. Could it be the Lantus?
 
enzina said:
Could it be the Lantus?
Click to expand...

From personal experience, it's a possibility. Lantus can act very fast if you inject it into a blood vessel rather than normal tissue. I believe I have had this twice (luckily managed to treat the hypo which happened soon after the lantus injection) and as a consequence now split my lantus dose so as to reduce the quantity being injected at one time. (Also it evens out the dose over the day). I stress that this has only (possibly) happened to me twice in 15 years of lantus use and I haven't had any issues recently.

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Fairly objective treatment of the subject from someone who hasn't experienced a lantus low and whose two doctors hadn't heard of it. (My DN hadn't heard of it either).

From someone who has experienced a lantus low.

and from the product disclosure statement
Intravenous administration of the usual subcutaneous dose could result in severe hypoglycemia.

Of course, there's no way to know for certain whether this happened to you....

I hope you feel better soon. Hypos are horrible.)


Edited to add - any chance you accidentally took fast acting instead of lantus, which might have a similar drastic effect?
 
Thanks very much for your fast reply @EllieM . There's no chance i mixed up Lantus with Novorapid. I also experienced such a Lantus low before and am aware of this thread. Just checked my PJs and there's a blood stain on it, injected in the tigh.
Such a shame, it's a lost day today.
 
Most likely Lantus and not steroids. I used to get Lantus lows at 3-4 am so I'd snack and go back to bed, but it's a persistent animal and requires mixed snacks of fast and slower acting sugar, so well done for mixing up your recovery bundle. I also found the recovery took ages followed by a massive spike of all the sugars I'd eaten in the emergency!

Thanks for noting the finger prick vs. Libre result - I've given up on Libre for minute-by-minute info, as it doesn't give you the 10 minute warning. If you'd gone with 3.5 you might have lost the urgency and had even more trouble.
 
Lantus notoriously can cause lows.

But I also want to say steroids can be an issue. I really really react to them, they work great but even a small amount and my BG level shoots up and requires a lot more insulin. I avoid them as much as possible but sometimes they are needed. Last time I was given a low dose shot for my back I used 16 extra units that day with hardly eating. I had to take pills for a few days and required extra insulin each day. And they stay stubbornly high for a few days plus after. But the worse is all of a sudden I go back to normal and then I will drop, and I don't know when that is going to happen. I know this from experience so I watch for it, but it's all of a sudden with me. I have to wonder since you said you had just returned to normal the day before if that might have happened to you.
 
Thanks so much! I believe the steroids have played a big part of it too.
 
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