the passionate ailurophile

Today, we learned what happens if a diabetic doesn’t eat soon enough after taking a very fast-acting insulin, in this case, Humalog.

Mike has eaten as much as 30 minutes after injecting himself with this, with no problems.  That’s why he thought it would be okay to shoot it before we left the house today, to go collect mail and do other errands, because we were planning to eat out and we’d probably be in a restaurant in half an hour.

Anyhoo, he first wanted to stop at CVS to drop off a couple of scripts to be picked up later, on the way home.  There was a line at the drop-off area, because some woman was being difficult with the pharmacy tech.  Then, he stopped at Staples because I’d said something earlier about needing a new printer ink cartridge.  I didn’t say I needed it TODAY, but he stopped anyway.

So I ran in and got it, was back to the car in five minutes.  Then we started heading for the Good Post Office, which is only a few miles away from Staples.  That’s when he said he felt really hungry, and could we stop and eat before picking up the mail?

I said, sure, it had been kind of long by this point since he did the insulin, and eating sooner than later would be better.  There’s a 99 restaurant on the way, so we went in there.

Everything was fine, we ordered food, we ate it, and I was finishing my beer, when Mike suddenly broke out into a sweat, and felt like he was going to faint.  At first I thought he was having a heart attack, but if he were, that defribrillator inside him would kick in.  He felt like he might want to vomit, and he went to the men’s room.

He was in there for a while, and I was scared that he’d never come out.  I was about to ask our female serer to find a male employee and send him in there to make sure Mike was okay, when he came out.

The whole thing passed, and Mike said he knew what it probably was, waiting too long to eat after taking the Humalog.  I looked this up online later, and sure enough, this is likely what it was.  I found this site, that has a chart with the various types of insulin on it, how long they take to work, when they *peak* and such.

The *peak* is when it makes the blood sugar the lowest.  The timing that it says there sounds about right for what happened today.  Even though he’d just finished a meal when he felt faint, it still takes a while for a meal to have any effect.  But the whole thing passed in 15-20 minutes.

So he won’t be doing that again, injecting the Humalog and then not eating right away.  The one thing that annoys me is that he has it in pen form, easy to carry around, but he refuses to inject it anywhere but at home or in a hotel room, when we travel.  And he insists on injecting it into his leg, which requires de-pantsing.  Not something he can do in public, and he doesn’t want to do it in a public restroom.

I suggested sticking it into his belly, in the car, before we go into a restaurant.  I used to work with a guy who used to stick it into his belly at work (where there was almost NO privacy), he’d just go into a corner somewhere, do it, and get it over with.

But Mike will not have any of this.  However, he’s going to have to figure out something, because he should be going back to work soon, how is he going to do insulin before lunch when he’s eating it away from home?  He says he’ll have to skip it before that meal, just do it before breakfast and dinner at home.

Maybe it will be okay, because he is also on Lantus, a time-release insulin that he takes before going to bed.  That is supposed to last over a period of 24 hours.  But I’m not sure.  I know he’s skipped the lunchtime Humalog when we’ve gone to ball games, and it hasn’t caused any problems with the sugar measurements.  So who knows?

Now I have to nag him to call the diabetes doctor and talk about this.  And to get him to see that it’s okay to sit in the car and jab himself in the belly, if he has to.

It never ends!