Spikes and Crashes

Blood sugar is an economy like the commodities market. But unlike the commodities market, blood sugar trades only in two commodities: glucose and insulin.

Spikes make you sick. Your face flushes and burns red. Ears especially. So can your fingers, hands, toes, and soles. There are headaches sometimes. Your eyes might scratch as though dried out, dessicated. These symptoms combine and exacerbate each other. Ride them for too long, they are destructive.

Crashes don’t necessarily make you sick. Rather, they threaten your life. After you experience crashes too many times, the symptoms lose some of their effect. What a crash at first causes is shakiness. The shakes, the jitters. This is your brain telling you that your blood is not providing it enough glucose. (The brain feeds on glucose alone. The brain dies without glucose.) Other symptoms can alert you to a blood sugar crash: cold sweat; seeing shapeless electric-blue spots and lines; mental confusion; distraction. But experiencing these symptoms too often leads to a sort of tolerance of them, fatigue. Blood sugar crashes without the usual symptoms, or crashes to a lower level before symptoms manifest.

This happened last night around 3:30. I had been reading Faulkner, and was now trying to sleep. I could not. So I got up and took my glucometer out to the living room and tested my blood sugar. The glucometer read: 22.

The blood sugar low that is considered imminently life-threatening is <21.

What happened? I accidentally overdosed on insulin. Recovery was swift: I ate a vanilla caramel Drumstick and an apple. I was fine by 4:00. I went back to bed.

Good night.