insulin shock, diabetic coma

A low can come on extremely quickly (minutes), and it's called insulin shock, which can lead to coma and rapid death. Technically, a low that needs to be treated is 70 or less, but even 85 or 90 can be dangerous if the glucose is in the midst of taking a nose dive and the person is an hour or less from really being in trouble. 85 or 90, or even a 70 that's stable and not nose-diving, isn't going to kill you, but it might feel pretty darned shaky and the person would probably want to treat it and get the glucose level up a bit.

A high normally takes at least days-weeks-months-years to develop to a place where it's bad enough to cause diabetic coma, which if not quickly reversed, can lead to eventual death.

I suspect that a person would have to have 600+ blood glucose average for quite a while to get into an actual coma or near-coma situation. As I said earlier, they'd be very sick. Sometimes they're admitted to the ER with symptoms of unresponsiveness, barely hanging on to consciousness, vomiting, babbling nonsense, etc, and then when the glucose is measured, it's found to be stratospheric, many times 800+. The highest I've heard of on my two diabetes lists (people who lived to tell the tale) were around 1200+. You can imagine how sick they were.

> Is it common for folks on meds to swing above say 400 out of the blue? I am personally pretty darn insulin resistant, and would have to make some kind of concerted effort to get above 400. But then I shoot lantus, and a lot of it, and that tends to smooth things even in the case of undershooting fast acting material>

Hey, you've been hanging out here long enough to know there's no one answer to this question. Sure, someone on just metformin, someone overweight, sedentary and making absolutely no effort to eat differently might easily see 400, especially if they're newly diagnosed and haven't come into control even once yet.

IMO, though, no one's going to see 300-400 out of the blue for no darned reason.

> I guess I have a hard time featuring going to the ER over a high>

Taking insulin and watching your food intake, you're probably not going to see 400, or even 300. The only exception I can think of to that is if you had a raging infection of some kind, were very ill with something, and/or maybe got put on huge doses of steroid meds.

Posted by: "Jude"
Judy D.