Wednesday lunch.. whoa. My first Hypo. I was standing in line at a food court waiting to buy some lunch when I got a cold sweat. Then my legs started to shake. I went and sat down with my food and my whole body started to shake. I realised I was having a Hypo and quickly took my blood glucose level.. 3.9, so I rushed to an empty shop and bought a coke and chugged half of it down. Slowly the shakes stopped. I then had the rest of my lunch and my BGL went up to a respectable 7.7.

So.. what was all that about you ask? Right now I'm taking a blended insulin that gives a hit after 30 minutes for breakfast/dinner and then has a longer acting effect that kicks in around lunch time. Because of the way it works, I have to eat at the right times or I won't have the right BGL in my system to work with the insulin. If I haven't had enough carbs or sugar then the insulin uses the sugar up in my blood and leaves none for the brain. The brain doesn't like this and starts sending out warnings. You have to get sugar in to your system -nownownow-. Coke, honey, those diabetic jelly beans.. they're all basically pure sugar.

So why did it happen on Wednesday. I was at the Diabetes Educator and we talked all morning. I didn't have morning tea and when we ended it was around 12:20.. so I was late for lunch. Eventually I won't be on this mixed insulin and I'll be able to give myself the right dose just before a meal and this sort of thing will hopefully be a long forgotten memory. I'll only have to worry about giving myself too much insulin then.

What was particular ironic was that after this had subsided, I still had some coke left which I wasn't going to finish. Another guy sat down next to me and I offered him the coke. He declined saying he was diabetic. I told him I was too and he then berated me for drinking coke. So that brings me to my next topic of conversation - Type 2 Diabetes.

There sure is a lot of information around about Type 2 Diabetes. Type 1 takes the back seat because it is much rarer. Type 2 is an epidemic right now due to high sugar diets, life style abuses, etc. It's on the rise. Type 1, on the other hand, is an auto immune disease that is completely unrelated to what you eat or how you exercise before you get it. They say that 10% of diabetes diagnosis are for Type 1, but that percentage isn't actually correlated.

So wading through the information to find out more about my condition is interesting and difficult at times. Either I'm barking up the wrong tree with what I read because it's actually for Diabetes Type 2, or people are giving me incorrect advice, dumping me in with the Type 2 crowd due to its bigger exposure to the public in general. I can usually nut it out pretty quickly.. they're either telling me I brought it on myself or telling me about pills I can take.

Type 2 occurs when the body decides not to produce insulin any more. Scientists haven't a clue how this happens or why this happens, but they can prescribe a drug that stimulates the pancreas to start producing insulin again and therefore a Type 2 can manage their life pretty well. If they don't look after themselves though, their condition gets worse, the drug may not work any more, they may have kidney problems, foot ulcers, sterility, so on.. and they may end up needing to inject insulin like a Type 1 does.

Type 1's don't produce insulin either, but they don't produce insulin because the part of the body that does that, the beta cells in the pancreas - they're dead, they're gone. They've been destroyed. There is no other way to manage Type 1 diabetes but to inject insulin. While Type 1's also have the threat of those later-life problems in the kidneys, feet, etc, they are -forced- to check their BGL four times a day. There's no way around it.

It occurred to me last night that if there is around 160,000 Type 1 diabetes in Australia, then there's around 2 million Type 1's in a population of 20 million? .. that basically means one in 200 people-ish has Type 1 diabetes. No wonder the support is so fantastic. But it also means one in 20 has Type 2, which explains why the information-sphere for Diabetes is filled with Type 2 information.

Thanks for everyone who's been giving me great support and information (relevant or not!, learning about Type 2 has been interesting too).