Hypos when you’ve used all your supplies

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Lucyr

Lucyr

Well-Known Member
Relationship to Diabetes
Type 1
Last night I had what felt like a scary hypo, whilst I was out at church. I haven’t had hypos in ages as I’ve been running high for a while so this felt very low to me. I’d only taken minimal supplies in my meter case in pocket, no bag, and they weren’t enough. Interested to know what others do in this situation.

I ate about 4:30pm. Guessed the carbs and calculated insulin in my head with what I thought was my ratio, but maybe I remembered it wrong. It was sandwich but from a round loaf of sourdough where the slices are different

18:32 3.3 as i arrived, had some lucozade

18:52 3.1 coffee with 2 sugars and 2 decent sized biscuits (no idea of carbs but round almost shortbread like ones with sugar on top)

Service started at 7 and assumed I had over treated the hypo anyway so didn’t fingerprick till afterwards

20:05 3.3 Glucose gel. Raided the kitchen for another 2 biscuits as needed to drive home.

20:17 3.2 Glucose gel

20:24 3.3 At this point I had run out of all my carbs and was panicking. Someone made me a warm water with a couple of sugars dissolved in as clearly more biscuits were of no use, and I’d run out of fast carbs

20:34 3.1 Another warm sugary water

20:44 4.7. Got a lift with someone else kindly driving my car home (I live alone) as didn’t feel safe enough to do a 45 minute wait alone in a car park with no spare carbs.
 
Blooming Heck Lucy! That is a nasty one! 😱 So pleased you had others around to support you. It sounds like some insulin has perhaps been trapped in tissue and released suddenly. I wonder if it was your Lantus. I think I have read of @trophywench having nasty hypos with Lantus. No wonder you feel rough this morning!

Thankfully I've not had a persistent one and always considered that I have plenty in my bag and the car to cover any eventuality, but your post has certainly made me wonder.... How much is plenty??
 
rebrascora said:
Blooming Heck Lucy! That is a nasty one! 😱 So pleased you had others around to support you. It sounds like some insulin has perhaps been trapped in tissue and released suddenly. I wonder if it was your Lantus. I think I have read of @trophywench having nasty hypos with Lantus. No wonder you feel rough this morning!

Thankfully I've not had a persistent one and always considered that I have plenty in my bag and the car to cover any eventuality, but your post has certainly made me wonder.... How much is plenty??
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I have a bottle of lucozade and a multipack of individually wrapped biscuits in my car, which I had considered plenty. I couldn’t have risked walking to the car and sitting there alone though, so I told someone at church who sat with me which helped me stop panicking. I’m now thinking that one bottle of lucozade (2 hypo treatments) isn’t “plenty” though after that scary experience.

Interested to know what others would do if caught hypo and run out of treatments.
 
I guess it depends where you are at the time.
I once went out with my partner in the horse and carriage and completely forgot that I had injected 4 units of NR for breakfast but had not eaten it. My prebolus time was 1.25hrs and I just got distracted and forgot. Worse still I had gone to the loo just before getting up with the horses and taken my bum bag off which contains all my supplies, testing kit etc and forgot to put it back on. 5 miles out with the horses I realised I didn't have my gear and hadn't had my breakfast and started to panic....... probably a good thing as the stress likely triggered my liver to dump glucose. We raked around in my partners pockets and found 2 loose mint imperials covered in fluff and dirt that he keeps for the horses and I ate those one at a time over a half hour period and amazingly didn't hypo, but was very close when I got back.

I did consider knocking on someone's door to ask for help and beg some sweets off them but when I didn't feel hypo it felt like it wasn't enough of an emergency and was a bit of an imposition, but if I had actually gone hypo and there weren't any houses near at the time, I would have been goosed and so would ian with 2 horses, a carriage and an unconscious groom! 😱 In my defence, I was fairly newly diagnosed and probably not switched on enough! Since then my little back pack/handbag with everything in it goes everywhere with me, day and night but I will be reassessing the supplies in there in light of your post. Maybe another tube of Lift tablets as well as the JBs and dried apricots.
 
Lucyr said:
Last night I had what felt like a scary hypo, whilst I was out at church. I haven’t had hypos in ages as I’ve been running high for a while so this felt very low to me. I’d only taken minimal supplies in my meter case in pocket, no bag, and they weren’t enough. Interested to know what others do in this situation.

I ate about 4:30pm. Guessed the carbs and calculated insulin in my head with what I thought was my ratio, but maybe I remembered it wrong. It was sandwich but from a round loaf of sourdough where the slices are different

18:32 3.3 as i arrived, had some lucozade

18:52 3.1 coffee with 2 sugars and 2 decent sized biscuits (no idea of carbs but round almost shortbread like ones with sugar on top)

Service started at 7 and assumed I had over treated the hypo anyway so didn’t fingerprick till afterwards

20:05 3.3 Glucose gel. Raided the kitchen for another 2 biscuits as needed to drive home.

20:17 3.2 Glucose gel

20:24 3.3 At this point I had run out of all my carbs and was panicking. Someone made me a warm water with a couple of sugars dissolved in as clearly more biscuits were of no use, and I’d run out of fast carbs

20:34 3.1 Another warm sugary water

20:44 4.7. Got a lift with someone else kindly driving my car home (I live alone) as didn’t feel safe enough to do a 45 minute wait alone in a car park with no spare carbs.
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Hello again, @Lucyr

I was going to do a post the other day asking a similar question to yours! but about testing. What do you do if you find yourself in a situation where you have no tests strips or libre goes down? It's never happened to me yet, but it was food for thought. I do have a spare test strip meter etc in the car, which is there if I have my car and I also carry a spare libre sensor in the boot of my car.
 
Scared stuff @Lucyr . Well done for asking for help and sensibly not driving home.
We know we need something, but haven’t got the physical capacity to sort it ,
and with hypo brain we might not make much sense.

Having a stash in the car is good. Perhaps a stash somewhere at the church would be good to. Easy to think of this after the event.

I have got caught twice. Once knocked on someone’s door and they brought me a glass of juice.
Another time sat down on the pavement, no phone. I got abuse from a couple of children, but an adult stopped and gave me sweets, as well as phoning OH. When I got home OH helpfully asked me why I hadn’t raided the bags of shopping I had!!! Hypo brain. Hypo treatments were in my bag and had run out. In my hands was ‘shopping’.

I hope you feel okay and have a more level day today.
 
Amity Island said:
Hello again, @Lucyr

I was going to do a post the other day asking a similar question to yours! but about testing. What do you do if you find yourself in a situation where you have no tests strips or libre goes down? It's never happened to me yet, but it was food for thought. I do have a spare test strip meter etc in the car, which is there if I have my car and I also carry a spare libre sensor in the boot of my car.
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Hi @Amity Island If I was in that situation and in any doubt I would eat some carbs. It is safer to do that and the correct if necessary, than go hypo.

Reading this thread it makes me think of all the hidden ‘juggling’ we do each day.
 
Amity Island said:
Hello again, @Lucyr

I was going to do a post the other day asking a similar question to yours! but about testing. What do you do if you find yourself in a situation where you have no tests strips or libre goes down? It's never happened to me yet, but it was food for thought. I do have a spare test strip meter etc in the car, which is there if I have my car and I also carry a spare libre sensor in the boot of my car.
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This is something that has occurred to me too recently and I think we then need to resort to good old " listening to our bodies" as was necessary before BG meters and Libre were invented. Of course we still usually have mobile phones most of the time so we can often ring someone and tell them where we are and what is happening, if we are capable of doing that. When I had my first few hypos I would ring my sister and talk to her until I was recovered. I have also resorted to reciting things whilst I am walking to assess if my brain is able to function reasonably well after I have treated a hypo. Things I learned at school like my tables or the periodic table or songs etc. Particularly if I am out walking late at night on my own when it is not practical to ring someone. I find that quite effective and reassuring, but like I said, I have never had a really persistent one even when I am out exercising.
Usually I over respond to carbs, so just 2 JBs will shoot my levels back up to 7 or 8 and I am one of those people who finds that just 1 or 2 JBs is usually enough and 3 too many and I almost never have long acting carbs afterwards because that would just push me into double figures and need more insulin later to bring it down.
 
Yes, I almost always retest (Libre makes that so easy) and would always recommend people follow the "15 rule" for hypo treatment, at least until they know how their body responds.
 
I think if I treated every "hypo" that Libre tells me I have, my levels would be through the roof! More often than not Libre's 3.9 turns out to be 5 point something or even the low 6's on occasion.

I agree it is scary when hypo treatments don't seem to work and the finger pricks stay obstinately below 4, but it hasn't happened often and luckily I've never run out of treatments, being a bit of a hoarder! Just checked my handbag and currently I have 2 tubes of 10 Lift tablets, 2 Kind bars, 1 mini pack of raisins and a tube of Glucose gel that is probably past its date. My only scare was when out walking the canal path near home. No handbag and only had a few Dextro tablets in my pocket, of which I took 3, but instead of doing the sensible thing of sitting down and waiting for them to work, I got the urge to get home asap, and ended up staggering the last few 100 yards to my front door, feverishly crunching the remaining tablets as I went.
 
The only time I have not had hypo treatments with me when I needed them, I went to the nearest cafe (which happened to being the climbing centre) and ate spoonfuls of sugar.
I learnt my lesson and never been in that situation since as I have tubes of GlucoTab in every bag and car and ...
The advantage of GlucoTabs/Lift over Dextrose is that they come in plastic tubes which don't go wet or hard.
 
I think I’ve come up with a backup solution through this which is warm water with sugar, or a sugary tea or coffee if I wasn’t that low. I probably needed 3 or 4 sachets rather than the 2 that were used, but neither me nor the other person had any idea how many would be needed.

If this had happened during the daytime I probably wouldn’t have said anything to anyone and would have gone to the shop for a sugary drink. The shop wasn’t open though and my brain was stuck in that “I can feel my brain isn’t working properly but can’t work out what to do about it” stage.
 
To all of you - NB it is not ONLY Lantus which can do this !! It's something to do with mono crystals forming within the skin and hence Insulin Glargine - once it came into widespread usage - became a notable culprit.

NB - I'd been using Lantus a fair few years by then.

Two whole bottles of old recipe ie high glucose content Lucozade plus half a new packet of custard creams got me high enough for long enough to drive home from the diabetes clinic at Rugby hospital and then 3 days of fire fighting to get down again to sensible levels and have enough time, mental and physical energy to then undertake the ensuing battle to get my GP to prescribe Levemir instead.

Like lots of other medications, for whatever medical condition be they prescribed, not every recipe suits every person for ever.
 
I have no idea what happened yesterday, but it hasn’t happened again today. I’ve used insulin for at least 10 years and it isn’t a normal hypo pattern for me, although I do very occasionally get these things when my pancreas decides to randomly cover all the carbs in a meal and then the insulin all kicks in afterwards. I think I’m going to take some carbs to work tomorrow to keep in my desk drawer though.
 
I am glad that this is such a one off Lucy, and that the stash is in the way to work.

I kept a box of JBs in the car. It got VeRY hot and I ended up with a large jelly blob.
Glucotabs behave better but ….
 
rebrascora said:
Yes, I almost always retest (Libre makes that so easy) and would always recommend people follow the "15 rule" for hypo treatment, at least until they know how their body responds.
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Retesting should be done with a finger prick. Libre is 15 minutes behind so you may end up over treating.
Libre 2 attempts to predict the 15 minute delay by extrapolating the graph. This is great most of the time but not when the graphs change direction such as when we correct a hypo - Libre prediction will show that you are deeper into the hypo rather than recovering.
 
A few packs of Dextrose tablets in the car and around the house are for me the best solution, small, neat, cheap and some nice flavours.
 
Well the glucose tabs went to work, and came home again as i forgot to take them out of my bag. Try again tomorrow!
 
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