Ok, so the last 2 weekends here in lower eastern MI it has been in the upper 90's if that's not bad enough someone literally stole my a/c unit. Both weekends I have dropped extremely low. Last weekend my 16 yr old daughter thankfully came home for an outfit, it was her dad's weekend, she found me passed out on the sofa, she checked my bg, it was 29 .She shot me up with the glucagon. She saved me once again.
Then this weekend same thing, I laid down to take a nap, bg was at 89, I woke up faint barely able to walk, grabbed a sunkist and while trying to suck it down my legs literally gave out from under me and down I went. When I came to and was able to check bg it was 33.
Both of these days it was 98 or 99, is it the heat or the nap?
Anybody else experience this?
Tina F T1 since 77 diagnosed at age 9 pumping since 2002
It's the heat. If I remember correctly, it makes people more sensitive to insulin.
Heat + humidity really gets me. I moved to Tulsa, OK a decade ago and have learned to cut back my basal rate once summer hits. Test a lot and give less for correction boluses while you figure out how to adjust your insulin for the heat. You may also want to set your alarm for 3am to catch any middle of the night lows.
See, I have found the opposite effect, but then again, it is hot and humid 10 months out of the year here, so I am used to it. Heat Index today is over 100. Yikes!
It's the heat. I get like this in the afternoon in the summers alot. My BS drops, because I am tired and want to nap. I check my BS more often and cut back on my basal rate.
I talked to my Endo nurse and she did say that unusual high heat usually creates a high bg reading and in the same breathe she said it will create one or the other and that some us will suffer severely from low's to stay hydrated and check often. 100's wow that's hot.
I'm wondering if the issue isn't really that cooler temperatures, particularly cold weather, require more insulin. In my experience, cold (whether outside or inside) leads to higher insulin requirement. Some physicians have argued that the real issue is activity changes from cold weather to hot weather. However, with careful monitoring of activity level, the issue for me is that I require more insulin in colder weather. This observation makes sense physiologically, since lots of immune functionality occurs in the skin. The immune system may deactivate a larger proportion of dosed insulin when insulin absorption is slower because of lower blood flow in the skin (in cold). All that said, to predict insulin activity, it is important to think about all of these factors all the time: timing and magnitude of dose, activity level, and ambient temperature.