Hi and welcome from me too.
I also thought your diagnosis of LADA is a bit odd as an initial diagnosis. I wonder if it is because you didn't present with DKA (Diabetic KetoAcidosis) that they are hedging their bets a bit, but great that they are not automatically chalking you down as Type 2 as often happens. For information, LADA is a slow onset Type 1 diabetes and very different from Type 2 but may present like Type 2 and even respond to dietary changes and Type 2 medication in the early stages, but eventually as the immune system slowly kills off your insulin producing beta cells, you will need insulin. There is a school of thought which sugests that early introduction of insulin, takes the strain off existing beta cells and therefore puts them at less risk of attack by the immune system, so preserving some of your "home grown" insulin production. In some cases this can buffer the small insulin doses you inject and make your BG management smoother, but in my experience I found my dwindling home grown insulin erratic and a nuisance and my diabetes has been easier to manage since it mostly petered out.
I wonder if the medical staff are using the label of LADA to hedge their bets as to your Type. Do you know if they have done C-peptide and GAD antibody tests? If you don't know.... ask! Diabetes is very much about self management and particularly in the current climate, so you really need to ask what tests they have done and what the results are in numerical form and learn all about it and keep records or gain access to your records so that you can understand where you are with your management and what you need to work towards. Knowledge is power and you need to become the expert in your own diabetes management.....There is a huge amount to learn and it is really overwhelming at first but this forum is probably one of the best resources in the world, likely the best, for practical knowledge and understanding as well as emotional support, so do lean on us and ask lots of questions.
As regards your initial question ....
Slightly confused as to what level is dangerious for me to get down to once I start hitting 5 and below I get headakes and dizziness, is this just because I’m not use to being at these ‘normal levels’ or do I let my level drop further,
You are looking to keep your levels above 3.9 ie 4 or above, however it is not intrinsically dangerous to drop below 4 as non=diabetic people do so from time to time, but below 3.5 is when your brain is at risk of suffering some damage and certainly below 3 is not good at all, but that doesn't mean to say that you will do permanent irreparable damage at those levels, but they are to be avoided if at all possible, partly because they will erode your hypo awareness and that is essentially your safety net, so you really want to preserve that.
In the early days, because your body has probably been running with very high BG levels for a while, levels well above 3.9 may make you feel quite unwell, but ideally you want your body to become reasonably happy with levels mostly in the 4-7 range, so if you feel bad when your levels are say at 6, then eating some jelly babies or whatever your chosen hypo treatment is, will probably send you back up into double figures and your body will not get used to those nice healthy in range levels, so you have to be a bit cautious with treating those false lows because you don't want to rebound too high. A normal hypo treatment (for when you are below 4) would be (15g carbs) which is about 3 jelly babies, so if you feel rough at 6, maybe try just one jelly baby and give it 15 mins to work and then test (finger prick) again to see if that has brought levels up a bit. If you have Libre, do be aware that it will take about half an our to show your levels have changed direction from dropping to rising, which is why people are encourage to finger prick when they feel hypo and also when they are checking recovery from hypo, because otherwise you can be tempted to over treat a hypo (or false hypo)
Anyway, I hope that answers your question. Jelly babies are one of the commonest hypo treatments because they are about 5g carbs each which is a niuce round number.... I never really understand why they don't make glucose tablets larger as they are about 3g each and are easily portable and work well for most people. It is worth knowing that we absorb glucose through the cells in our mouth as well as the rest of our digestive tract, so chewing your hypo treatment really well or swishing it around your mouth with a liquid hypo treatment will usually work faster than a few chews and swallowing, so try not to panic and eat too much (can be challenging when you get the hypo munchies and want to eat everything in sight
🙄 ) and chew well before swallowing to get greatest impact from what you do eat.
If any of that doesn't make sense, please ask. I am just over 4 years down the line and still learn something new about diabetes nearly every day and I frequent the forum pretty much every day to share my experience and learn from others, so there is a big learning curve and you are probably currently on the steepest part of the curve, so do step back a bit when you feel overwhelmed but keep coming back to ask and top up your understanding and little by little it will become your new norm.
