So I woke up this morning at normal time, 6:30 am, my blood sugar was 97, I then had scrambled eggs and a small piece of toast. However when I tested again at 8:30, my blood sugar was HI. This has never happened in my 12 years of being a diabetic. Has anyone ever experienced this? I medicated according to my insulin pump, and I have even been drinking a ton of water, since then. I have never felt so sick, so instead of correcting with my pup I took an insulin shot but I'm still feeling super sick.
Have any of you experienced this before? And does anyone know of any tips that help for high blood sugar symptoms, I haven't dealt with a high like this in several years.
Ren - did you wash your hands and retest just to confirm the HI reading? If you get any sort of sugar on your finger (even incidentally) it can give a false reading. (I know the shock of seeing HI really gets your heart racing - but I have seen false highs with my son due to this.)
If you double checked and it was indeed HI, I would suspect a kinked or otherwise bad infusion set. Or possibly a very large bubble in your tubing (least likely). I would get a new infusion set ASAP and if that is not possible, (like if you are at work) I would test often and continue giving insulin by injection, and make up for missed basal insulin until you can change the site.
Basically, besides also checking for ketones and giving extra insulin to help with those, you are already doing what you need to come down from a high.
I had this once when I was on the 2 shots a day.. I was actually at softball practice working out and drinking water when I checked and had HI. the dr just told me to do what you are doing! They said drink water, use the restroom, and exercise. It still took a while to come down though..
Hi Ren, the first thing I would suggest is to change your infusion site - immediately! Even though it may look fine from the outside, it might have a slight kink in the cannula that is causing a slower delivery of insulin, but not stopping it altogether therefore there is no "No delivery" alarm.
I had a similar experience about a month ago. For no apparent reason (although I was on a business trip and in a different time zone - 2 hours difference), my BGs just shot way up. My meter didn't actually read HI but I was just a few points off that mark! I didn't change out my infusion set right away, as I had left the extras in my hotel room. I did do what you are already doing: drank lots and lots (and LOTS) of water! I also kept correcting, via my pump, which apparently helped. By about 4 hours after the highest BG, wouldn't you know it, I crashed! I must admit that for once, it felt good to have a low BG, which I corrected and afterwards things settled down.
I had washed my hands right before I checked. And as for the infusion set, I changed it immediately after that blood sugar reading. That's always my first response to a reading like that. My confusion came from how much my blood sugar shot up just after one piece of toast. Even if my site was bad and I wasn't getting any insulin, I have never had one piece of toast shoot me up 500 pts or more. If I was in the 2 or 3 hundreds then I could understand but to go from 97 to Hi in two hours just seemed odd to me. I could just be paranoid because I haven't dealt with hi's in a long time
Is your basal rate higher in the AM to accommodate dawn phenomenon? If so, and assuming you got zero insulin for the toast and 2 hours of basal, maybe the HI isn't so unrealistic - keeping in mind that over 300, I think the meters are kind of in a crap shoot as far as accuracy goes. I've tested my son 2 minutes apart and he's been like 450 and 360. Obviously, very high, but nowhere close to each other.