The lung-bone’s connected to the pancreas-bone

Warning: much tedious medical detail follows. 

I’m over the gastro, and I’m pretty much over the flu, and then today I had a horrible blood sugar day.  This is so enormously frustrating.  It’s like it shouldn’t be happening, the whole world knows it shouldn’t be happening, and yet happening it is, and I don’t see anything I can do about it.  But because it seems so absurd, I feel kinda guilty for it, like it must be my fault somehow, because how could I expect anyone else to believe this? 

I’ve been diagnosed as pre-diabetic.  (Which is odd in itself.  I’m young, slim, and my cholesterol is low)  The (somewhat dodgy) dietician told me not to eat more than 30g of low-GI carbs per meal.  So that’s precisely what I ate for breakfast.  One and a half slices of super-low-GI, carb-reduced bread, buttered, and half a cup of lentil stew measured out with the itty bitty measuring cup.  That’s all, no more.  An hour and a half later and I’m starting to feel drowsy.  Blood glucose result: 8.7mmol/L. 

Now a result like that would serve me right if I’d been eating a tray of cakes, but… how can I put this?  I ain’t done nothin’!  I just don’t get it. 

I’m hoping it’s something to do with my asthma puffers.  Last time I had a cough from a flu, I got strong overdose symptoms from my salmeterol puffer.  Even when I stopped taking it altogether.  When the flu ended, I cut my dose by half.  So this time around, while I’m not suffering any major overdose, my lungs do feel unnaturally clear.  Odd, for someone who’s coughing with the flu.  I don’t know how it works, but my guess is there’s a whole lot of medicine powder just sitting around in my lungs, building up slowly.  And when I get a cough, somehow it all gets absorbed at once – instant overdose. 

So, the next leap of logic is, might one of those puffers, in overdose mode, be seriously messing with my blood sugar?  Apparently it’s possible.  But it could be the salmeterol (the long-acting bronchodilator), or the fluticasone (the steroid), or of course, both.  Now I’ve just cut my steroid dose by half (actually, closer to 75%, but don’t tell my doctor *g*) two weeks ago.  It takes two weeks to wear off, and the mysterious cough-overdose effect might be completely masking any effect of the dose reduction.  Which means basically this.  I have no idea what is happening.  I cannot run any test at present to find out what is happening.  All I can do is wait another couple of weeks to really see what the low fluticasone dose really looks like.  Then, if that produces no changes in glucose, and I’m still not dying of asthma, I can try reducing the salmeterol dose.  Then I can wait around and look for subtle changes.  Oh, this is killing me. 

Meanwhile, I’ve been alternately ravenous, drowsy, nauseous, weak, shaky, irritable and more irritable the whole useless day.  Having tasted the heady red-cordial highs of brown lentils on wholemeal toast, my body is now refusing to burn any fuel but carbs.  Disavowing any knowledge of ketosis, when glucose gets low, my body stumbles and fumbles and threatens to collapse like a helpless baby bird.  And i feel embarrassed and guilty for being mother to an imbecile.