Hello fellow and female diabetics, and the friends who support us. This week, I’d like to talk about The Plunge.
If you are on insulin or other blood glucose-lowering medications, you’ll know The Plunge. It’s where your blood sugar drops at an alarmingly rapid rate usually because of insulin or other medicines. It feels very unpleasant.
What’s it like? Explaining diabetes feelings to non-diabetics is tricky, and it needs a lot of imagination. You search your vocabulary and powers of observation for ways to describe it and still come up short. Metaphors work the best, but they are still hard to think up.
The Plunge works well for me because it signifies a roller-coaster. There you are at the top; then suddenly, you’re heading to the bottom at super-fast speed.
Signs of fast-dropping blood sugars include tiredness, a lot of yawning, shakiness and confusion. They are also all symptoms of hypos.
One of the reasons we promote The Diabetes Diet (low-carb eating) is that it makes The Plunge easier to avoid. This is because you won’t need to take as much fast-acting insulin with your meals. Using fast-acting insulin can be a be a bit like picking up a sledgehammer to crack a nut. It isn’t subtle stuff, that’s for sure.
This isn’t a guarantee. Sometimes, you’ll need extra insulin to cover unexpected high blood sugar levels, and The Plunge may result.
But overall, using lower levels of insulin to cover meals means steadier blood sugar levels overall. Dips up and down are far less dramatic and therefore don’t feel as yucky. (This is a technical term.)
How do you experience The Plunge, and can you think up better ways to describe than I can?
Diabetes Diet 
I call it the collapse. I think of it like one of those buildings being demolished. Boom, Boom, Bang. First step is like section one (110- 70), section two (70 to 50) and section three the bottom falls out. Of course your diabetes like my numbers may vary.
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Love that imagery – works well for me!
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For me it has nothing to do with my insulin intake but exercise. I can sit in a chair watching the news after getting home in the morning and it will climb, also do to it dropping while at work over night and then overcompensating so I can drive home. All that is needed is for me to have to clear snow or just walk around in the store to get it to drop, fast, I drive a lawn tractor with a push blade (and power steering) and I can watch my CGM graph do the roller coaster plunge. I have cut back on carbs after talking to another endo about it and can say they have made almost no change in these crashes. My previous endo kept asking me if I was sure I was eve type 1. She ran a few tests and yep, I sure am but I am highly insulin sensitive instead of having insulin resistance. After all these years (40+) as diabetic and little resistance. I guess I should be happy or at least relieved.
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Great that you have such good insulin sensitivity after all these years! I get lows with exercise (and highs with the lack of) but they’re aren’t quite as dramatic as what insulin does to me sometimes.
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