Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Low Blood Glucose Scare

I should have taken note of the low BG my son had yesterday after the walk to the 8th grade graduation ceremony. His BG was low, but not dangerously low.

 Today - well his BG  went REALLY low.

 I got a phone call from the school right on 3.30 pm today - thats when school gets out of the day..

The office lady says - My son is feeling shakey - what does he need to have?

My reply - He needs sugar ASAP.
Does anyone have any juice or pop?
Does he have a packet of dextrose 4 glucose tablets in his bag?
The answer to both those questions was NO.

So I rushed down to the school taking some juice boxes with me. He looked fine when I got there - the office gave him some small pastries because they have sugar. But they take a while to be digested. 

I measured his BG - it was 2.5 mmol/L - which is very low. The usual range for mmol/L is 4 -7 for adults and 4-10 for kids.

So I gave him 2 juice boxes. Within 5 minutes his BG was back up to 4.7 and by the time we got home, it was up to 6.2 mmol/L which is good.

He had been running around for the last hour before home time, from 2.30 recess until the home bell at 3.30pm which is why his BG went so low.

Now I will have to watch and see that he doesnt go too high before I can give him the next insulin which he usually gets at 6 - thats one hour from now.

We discovered the dextrose 4 glucose packet in his lunch bag which he had left at home.

I gave the left over juice boxes to the staff - there are only 2 more days of school left.

There is a meeting planned with the staff for diabetes education tomorrow and I was planning to tell them about all this - but at least now they have had a "practice situation".

I was telling my son he did exactly the right thing - to go to the office instead of trying to walk home. The only reason why I hadnt supplied the school with any emergency stuff is because we dont have any money to purchase it except the juice boxes that happened to be handy. We had purchased those for his lunch right before he was dx'd as type 1 - so they have never been used. Now he has milk for his drink rather than juice.

Now I know that he must have some carbs at 2.15 pm before the afternoon recess. The trouble is that we never know when the kids are going to be outside - its one of those things that cannot always be planned for. But more carbs before exercise sounds like a great idea.

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