An Off Day – It Started When I Got High

Can I just mention that I’m incredibly tired of the cotton mouth, sweaters on my teeth feeling. Why can’t there be hyperglycemic unawareness? That’d be way more convenient for me than the hypoglycemic unawareness that I experience with every low. It’s at times when I have the cotton mouth, sweaters on my teeth feelings that I wonder how I made it through a year without checking my blood or taking insulin…I can’t figure it out, but I digress.

So, I woke up with a cottony mouth, sweaters on my teeth feeling. I knew I was high, I didn’t know why I was high. There was no good reason to be high I thought to myself. I was normal when I went to bed, and I usually don’t wake up high, I usually wake up low. Yeah, there was no reason to be high. I checked my blood 347. Yup, nice and high. Well, not nice and high, I can think of better “nice and highs”, but I was high, in the blood sugar sense of course, I wouldn’t be disturbed if it were any other kind of high…so, i was high, and there was no good reason, that was, until I took off my pajamas.

As my pajama bottoms dropped to the floor, I noticed that there was no tug on my belly from the weight of my pump that should’ve been dangling at my side. It wasn’t dangling at my side, no, it was still in my pajama pocket, and my pajamas were on the floor. And there on top of my pajamas was my pump tubing. Obviously it wasn’t connected to me. I had gone all night with my pump not being connected to me and thus, I was high.

The smart person in me would’ve checked for ketones (make note of this, this is important), but do you think I was smart, no, I was high, I’m not particularly smart when I was high, I don’t think much. So I bolused for my blood sugar but not the ketones that I can be sure that I had (I get them easily, with no insulin for 10 hours, they were probably high too).

When my blood sugar still hadn’t come down 2 hours later, I was frustrated, well, it had come down to 274 but still, that’s high. So at that point, I decided, I don’t care. And that’s the way the rest of my day went.

Later on, after ate lunch and had done some various tasks, I realized that I hadn’t checked my blood or taken insulin for my lunch. I rolled my eyes, shrugged my shoulders, checked my blood (224) and took insulin. Notice, I was still high.

That afternoon, I decided I wanted some peanut M&M’s. This time, the whole thought of checking my blood and bolusing for them didn’t even cross my mind and it was hours later before I remembered. I checked my blood and was 312.

I had been high all day, I had neglected my blood sugars, I hadn’t taken insulin when I needed it and I never checked for ketones. And when it was all said and done, right before bed, do you think I cared, *shakes head* no. But I did take insulin so I’d be normal the next morning because I realized how easy it would be to slip into my state of nothingness where my diabetes is concerned. How easy it would be to ignore and neglect it. How easy it would be to see how many days could go by before I got dangerously sick and almost die again.

Yes, it would be dangerously easy to ignore it all and repeat what I did to myself back in 2003.