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Hi everyone

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WestCountryWurzle

New Member
Relationship to Diabetes
Carer/Partner
I don't know if I'll come to the forums often but wanted to sign up for somewhere to come for advice if/when I want/need it.

My wife of 18 months is type 1 diabetic (She has been for just over 20 years now.). There's been a few occasions when I've helped her deal with a hypo; even though I pretty much know what to do and how to help, there are a few times when I feel helpless for want of a better way of putting it.

I guess it's just nice to know that, signing up to this forum, I have somewhere I can come to to ask for advice etc.
 
Yeah and I applaud you for doing that - all 'other halves' help greatly when we need em to but would be nice if they all understood a bit more.

However - can you leave the asking advice until AFTER you two have sorted whatever it is goes wrong, please? If you need to know NOW - dial 999 and they'll soon sort you out because ambulance services have folk who can explain what to actually do over the phone whether it's CPR or midwifery skills, suspected strokes and I assume but don't actually know - hypos.

Do you - as a couple - know about the Hypostop injection kit? It saves any number of 999 calls!
 
Hello and welcome from another one who is awake in the night.
You have come to the right place to ask any questions you have.

As @trophywench says it is good to have OH to help at times. I sort of expected mine to mind read for quite a while, and when I am hypo my mind is not exactly easy to read, for him or me if I have gone too low. Then I learnt to explain what helps and what does not.

What I find most useful is:

His calm
If I wake in the night with rocketing BGs (as now. He has generously shared his cold with me!!).
I have shown him the flowchart I follow for high BG and also when to switch to the sick day rules. Where things go very wrong he can remind me to wait a while before testing again, or run through the checks that I need to do on my pump before panicking.

His understanding of hypos.
If I ask him to get me the juice he knows I have gone very low and doesn’t start asking which juice I want or what size glass. He won’t get a sensible answer! If I phone from town having had a couple of hypos in a row he will just offer to come and collect me. When we are out walking I check my levels with a Libre. A Wurther is on hand in response to the arrows.

The ups and downs of Diabetes are now just part of our ‘normal’ life
 
@trophywench I can happily assure you I won't be coming here for advice during one of my wife's hypos; if I ever needed immediate help/advice for an 'In progress' hypo I'd be on the phone for medics 🙂 Thankfully there's been only one occasion when I've need to dial 999 (I hope it stays at just one occasion.), all other incidents have been small ones.

It was a hypo last night that prompted me to sign up to a diabetes forum. My wife did a check with her Libra and it came back LO with a little red line; my immediate thought was 'Crumpets, this may need more than the usual chocolate bar & Lucozade'. I did go and get some chocolate from the kitchen whilst quickly thinking what else I might need to do; when I got back to my wife she'd done a blood test with her old accu-check kit, it had given a reading of 3.9; anything 4 & below is a hypo for her. We were both a bit baffled why the Libra was giving such a lower reading than the accu-check kit. Thankfully a chocolate bar and bottle of Pepsi helped sort the hypo out.

What I didn't understand was why the accu-check kit responded quickly whereas the Libra responded slowly; at one point the Accu-Check gave a reading of 6.2, indicating she was out of the hypo, whilst the Libra was still saying LO, indicating she was still in a hypo. Thankfully I could tell she was coming out of it because she was acting more herself.

At the time I felt a bit unsure what to do (Which led to a feeling of helplessness.) because the Libra reading was indicating things were potentially bad whereas the accu-check, as well as my wife's general behaviour, were indicating it wasn't a bad hypo.

Sorry, this post turned out a bit longer than I initially thought it would be. I've never heard of a hypostop injection kit; I don't know if my wife has. I'll ask her when she gets home tonight. hank you both for your replies 🙂
 
There is an inherent time lag in the readings given by the Libre of about 10 mins because it's measuring glucose in interstitial fluid rather than blood.
 
PLEASE don't let your wife have chocolate when hypo - unless you mean as a reward LOL afterwards. There's one helluva lot of fat lurking in normal choc which slows down the fast acting carb in the fruit juice or jelly babies, glucose tabs or whatever people use too much, so the hypo lasts longer than it should have.

I've found (obviously from trial and error on myself) that I'm far better off in the long run by setting not '4 is the floor' but about 4.4 or 4.5, because over a period I always start to lose my hypo symptoms and then I don't physically get them till I'm already under 4, then the 3.9 or whatever becomes 3.8, 3.7 etc. You can see how fast it's dropping by checking the Libre graph thingy on the handset

OK I start getting the symptoms at 4.0+, and yada yada that gets tedious, but at least it means I can treat it ON MY OWN with no assistance and no panic - cos a quick 3g carb worth of juice or ONE jelly baby or whatever will blast my BG up by 1.0 on the meter which lets face it 5.0+ on the meter is normal human, not diabetic and ain't going to ruin my life to be normal ! Lovely for a bit. Plus if the ruddy meter starts beeping from the 'low' from a pre-meal test just as my dinner is in front of me, I can just tell it to shut up, calculate and take a manual bolus for the carb content and enjoy my meal. When I've finished eating after a few minutes MY husband will remind me to test cos I'll have forgotten by then, and of course I'm officially fine again!
 
I didn't know that about the chocs; thanks for the heads up trophywench. I'd always gone for it as my wife had said to me about giving her chocs to help with hypos. I'll mention to her what you said and, in future, I'll stick to giving her just the Dexter energy tabs she has. My wife is very good in doing the best she can to keep her levels at normal levels. If a reading is a bit below 5 she starts taking preventative steps.

@khskel That's a good thing to know about the Libra. My wife has only just recently been given a Libra and is on a 6 month trial with it so it's a bit new to both of us. It's definitely good for me to know it's measuring glucose in the intestinal fluid rather than the blood.
 
Interstitial, not intestinal. The sensor isn't that long 😉
 
Oops, typing error on my part. Normally it's my brain thinking one word and my mouth saying another; in this case it was my fingers typing a different word to what I was thinking lol.

At least it was a humour error hehe
 
WestCountryWurzle said:
Oops, typing error on my part. Normally it's my brain thinking one word and my mouth saying another; in this case it was my fingers typing a different word to what I was thinking lol.

At least it was a humour error hehe
Click to expand...
Easily done, that's why we call an overnight flat line on the libre graph a flatfish!
 
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