Monday, October 22, 2007

Stress


22 October 2007 Day 14
Originally uploaded by LilituC.

Both higher and lower than I expected. Huh? Well, it should have been much higher, but for the last hour I've been involved in a stupid argument on the internet. After I read a particularly ignorant statement about diabetes (low blood sugar, in fact), I felt I had to correct the misinformation. Still confused?

Well, one way I'm different than a typical diabetic is that stress lowers my blood sugar. Yes, lowers. So I was expecting a low number (and it's probably still dropping). This isn't as great as you might, think, though. Getting upset, crying, getting angry, and general stress all cause me to have lows.

My theory, which also would explain why my diabetes is so weird and my hypoglycemia before I was diabetic, is that my liver doesn't dump sugar when it's supposed to. I've never recovered from hypoglycemia without eating, no matter how long I wait.

3 comments:

Chrissie in Belgium said...

Lili, I have always wondered about that. Do some people have hypos from stress? So yes they do! Not with me. Of course it I run around a lot, my bg will go down, but when I get furious it most often will shoot up. The problem is that it doesn't always shoot up so you cannot give a correction bolus every time you immediately get pissed off! Wouldn't it be nice if we could make corrections immediately?! Oh this disease! It keep us thinking! My bg did NOT go up after what Skye did this weekend......

eu said...

I work at dLife and I was wondering if you would like to be added to our diabetes blogger email list? Every week we send a fun video clip about diabetes. If you are interested, please contact me at urbahn at dlife dot com. Thanks!

Bad Decision Maker said...

I think stimulation can lower blood sugar - like studying hard, being in an intense social situation where you're meeting or interacting with a lot of people, or being in a huge store that has a lot of stimulation. So maybe that's what stress does for you - more of the stimulation response that makes your brain use up sugar and less of the stress response that raises it.