MikelBear

I'm 51 and have been type 1 since I was 12, so your mom and I are in the same ballpark. I also went thru a period of time when I was having the same types of troubles as you describe with your mother. I've posted the following essay to several other people in similar situations with family members--so many, in fact, that I'm really beginning to see how common a trap this is to fall into. Every 2-4 months a daughter or mother or wife or girlfriend of a diabetic with uncontrolled glucose levels-- mostly undetected lows--posts for advice on the deterioration of their loved one. Not everything in the essay is exactly about YOUR post, but take from it what you can.

Here it is:
"I totally understand the frustrations and difficulties you face dealing with (mom)--I WAS pretty much that kind of person for quite a while, and it does put a lot of stress on the individuals, not to mention your relationship. From the point of view of the diabetic, let me attempt to explain something, which does not in any way excuse her behavior, but may help you to understand it. We're scared of high readings. We're scared ****less of them--they represent the bogeyman of complications, unseen, wrecking our internal origins. If high readings are our enemy, it must follow that low readings are our friend. Faulty logic, we realize, but nonetheless, the more time we spend low, the faultier our logic becomes and the less we can feel our lows, until this sort of twilight edgy state of consciousness becomes accepted as nearly normal. It makes us edgy, nervous, paranoid, stubborn and, unfortunately, enormously resistant to seeing how "off" we are and trying to change it. It makes us resistant to suggestions that we need to change anything. And it's a vicious cycle--Afraid of highs, we drive our sugars progressively lower and lower. the lower we get, the less we "feel" low--in other words, when we live at 90 and seldom venture lower than 75, 65 feels pretty bad. But if we live at 70 and often venture down to 55, we barely notice 50. It's a VERY small range, when you think of it-- between 75 being just below fine, and 55 being just above whacky--only 20 points. There's no clinical difference between the 20 points separating 85 and 105, but a HUGE difference between 55 and 75. The more time we spend in the 70's and lower, the less we feel it affects us, and the less we feel it at all. Your (mother) has dulled her sense of alarm and danger by spending way too much time in this neighborhood. There IS one fairly certain way out of this--it requires a lot of dedication and hard work. She needs to scrupulously avoid a reading below 80 for two weeks. If she can manage that (and she can--IF a coalition of friends, family, doctor, employer, whoever can be enlisted to support you puts the screws to her) than she will recover her own internal sense that these low readings are bad for her. It's a form of intervention that took me from a twilight of nearly 10 lost years of my life into a fully functioning person. I remember doing MANY stupid things--being outside working in the yard, or shoveling snow, lost track of time and eating, went too low to know or care, figuring, "Whatever...", then wondering why, when my wife finally pulled me in to eat when I was way too low to stop and figure it out myself, why someone hadn't taken better care of me sooner... And her being really mad at me for letting myself get like that, and me being mad at her for letting me get like that... and around and around. It's HER fault, and it's NOT her fault--at this point her thinking processes are likely slightly impaired on an on-going basis, and if ehe spends a lot of time low, ehe likely has never sufficient glucose in her system to built up a counter- regulatory store of glycogen in the liver to allow her to fight off lows herself. She requires a time- out, as we say in Special Education, both for her mind and her body. She needs to repair her thought process and her liver response to hypoglycemia. She needs to back off a dangerously tight degree of control. Her frequent number of lows indicate that she is out of control, and she's courting permanent brain damage, which will scar her memory, judgement, reaction time and mental acuity. I've been diabetic for 38 years, and I lost the entire 1990's to the fog of hypoglycemia. I dragged myself back through fear, guilt over the hurt I'd inflicted on my wife and children, a couple of near-misses in the car and one wake-up fender-bender, two 911 calls at work and several more at home, and a desire to stop being a ticking time bomb. I wanted control, not just over the diabetes, but over myself. It takes incredible patience, determination, strength and willpower to do it. Read her the riot act. Call her doctor and insist that the doctor read her the riot act as well. She may think he's protecting you from a tomorrow of her blind, in dialysis, in a wheelchair, but she's subjecting you to a today of anger, frustration, danger, hurt, emotional torment and confusion. Print out my letter and sit with her as she reads it. Look into her eyes and ask him, "What are we going to do about this problem, Mom?"

Good luck with her, she MUST get off the roller-coaster of destruction she's on before she comes to harm. Hypoglycemic unawareness is a VERY dangerous condition, but it CAN be reversed.
Also, she may be on the wrong kinds of insulin--I was and it nearly killed me. I regained much of my early awareness of lows when I switched from Humulin Regular and Humulin NPH to Lantus and Humalog. The Humulin insulins themselves are part of the problem--they generally don't give long-term type 1s like us any warning symptoms. I've found the newer analog insulins like Lantus, Novolog and Humalog DO give symptoms.

Michael, Type 1 since 1965