High blood sugar or low?

[anonymous]

How do you guys realize when you have high or low blood sugar? can you feel it or do you have to test it? I ask cause my doctors discovered when i was younger than my blood sugars would go kinda high after i ate, but it normalized soon. (the numbers are different than the states, we go by mmols). Anyways, recently i have been feeling weeker and weeker after i ate my first meal, like shaky, kinda sweaty and feeling like i could faint. However. most of the things i come by says that this is because i have low blood sugar and not high...so what's the deal? What do you guys feel like when you have low or high blood sugar? can you tell with feeling alone or do you need to test it with a monitor? I'm just kinda confused...

Thanks

Kiel

 

[spicyone18]

Its harder for me to tell when I have a high blood sugar, but most of the time when I have high sugars I am really thirsty and my mouth gets really dry no matter how much I drink. When I have low sugars I too get really shaky, weak, cold sweat, going to faint feeling. I hate having low sugars its an awful feeling.

 

[anonymous]

I used to get the clammy, shaky, sweaty, gonna faint feeling after devouring an entire packet of sweets for breakfast sometimes, which i always assumed was from having high blood sugars...perhaps the symptoms of high and low are actually very similar?
Kat (37 with CF, NZ)

 

[anonymous]

When I have low blood sugar I feel weak. My arms and legs feel like jello/jelly. I break into a sweat out of nowhere. I have a hard time concentrating. On occasions I get headaches and I tend to get cranky and for some odd reason I get hungry - like stomach growling hungry not just hungry like I could go for a sandwich, but hungry I could eat everything in the fridge hungry lol. I had my blood sugar drop into the 30s once and I had temporary hearing loss - that only happened once though and it was because my B.S was soooo low.

When my blood sugar is high I get very sleepy, have horribly painful headaches and feel sick to my stomach. I get cranky when I have high blood sugar as well as low. Before I started taking insulin, I would get blurry vision too. I haven't had that since I was diagnosed with CFRD.

Hope that helps. I am not a dr. but I will say this. A friend of mine usually gets low B.S.s after he eats because his dr. said he produces to much insulin. If you are experiencing low blood sugar on a regular basis I am pretty sure you are supposed to take in more protein and eat like 5-6 small meals a day vs. 3 big ones. That is what my mom has to do anyhow.

Hope that helps,
Lindsey
23 w/CF and CFRD

 

[JennifersHope]

Since I still can't sleep I might as well answer more posts..

. I can't tell when my sugar is high other then I am real thirsty.... but I am always real thirtsty anyway.. but when my sugar drops.... and I don't mean real low I mean like in the 60s even... I got weak, dizzy and very fast heart racing... It is so scary... I usually throw candy in my mouth..and rade the nearest refridge I can find... This happen to me last week... I am trying to lose weight.. being on steroids constantly put me overweight..... anyway I did real good for that whole day.. then my sugar dropped.. and walaaaaaaaa I must have eaten 1000 calories in 10 minutes... I ate a whole box of candy.. and then peanut butter and jelly sandwhich.. with two glasses of milk...and then went on to something else...

Jennifer..

 

[thelizardqueen]

Its usually hard for me to tell when I'm having a low. I won't feel it till I'm near passing out. When I'm high though I know it - I get thirsty, really cranky and I get nausious. With low sugars I'll test, and then I'll get shaky and clammy.

 

[anonymous]

ugh weird, that is what i thought. When i got my blood sugars checked, they were a bit high. However, i have symptoms of having too little blood sugar, I will get weak, sweaty, agitated and just a general blah feeling. I wonder what it is. The only thing i can think of is that I'm hypoglycemic and diabetic. Hhaha, is this possible. I know some people if they eat carbs in the morning, they produce too much insulin, causing a drop in blood sugar and that crazy feeling. I wonder if i don't produce that much to start, but then overcompensate?

*shrugs*

haha you guys are great, i can ask questions and kinda troubleshoot things before i get to the doctors. However, generally i think a lot of you know more what's going on then the docs some of the time. That's the great thing about so many people learning and suffering with the same disease <img src="i/expressions/face-icon-small-tongue.gif" border="0">

Kiel

 

[Diane]

I've had diabetes for 26 years now and i can tell you that over the years the symptoms of high and low start to fade together to some extent. There have been times where i was very thirsty and dragging from being sooo tired ( what used to be my high sugar symptoms) and checked my blood sugar and they were low. I've also had times when i was sure i needed extra sugar and checked my blood sugar and it turned out they were high. I used to test my blood sugars only 3 or so times a day, now it is more like 8 - 10 times a day. I have had times when my blood sugar could be in the 200's and drop to like 50's in a matter of about 45 minutes. This usually only happens in the early day time after ive taken my insulin. This is why i check , check, and re-check my blood sugars aften. Diabetes can be unpredictible especially when you have cf.

 

[anonymous]

You know, i was just reading something on the cystic L website....they said that hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) is common in cf because our insulin is released slowly, and a lot of times it is still released longer after the peak of our blood spike, accounting for the lows that we can get. Makes me feel a bit better <img src="i/expressions/face-icon-small-smile.gif" border="0">

 

[abloedel]

I just recently began testing (was diagnosed as pre-diabetic in Nov) and the two most common things I notice are that when it's low, I get sweating and shaky and when it's high, I have a really bad headache and blurry vision.