Reactive Hypoglycemia Caused my Son’s Nightmares

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A Nightmarish Disorder

I had a recurring nightmare as a child. Every night I would take a bath, run out of the bathroom, and watch rats stream down the stairs and eat my grandmother. The nightmare changed over the years, but they were always terrifying, and woke me up frequently at 4 a.m. I was often unable to get back to sleep, and felt tired, irritable, and stressed through lack of sleep. My youngest son, Leo, inherited my disorder, and as early as 2-years-old would wake, screaming at 4 a.m. As he continued to have nightmares through his early years, if only we had realized we could have avoided our nightmares by a simple diagnosis and eating a slice of toast before bed. Our path to this discovery is long and winding, but one that many reactive hypoglycemics will recognize.
Some Moms are soccer moms. Some are karate moms. Myself? I’m an emergency room mom. My youngest son, Leo, went to the emergency room sixteen times before he was ten years old (my oldest son has only been to the ER once!). Leo’s unfortunate ability to fall off of tables, break bones, and walk into walls, combined with both of us suffering from frequent nightmares, plus my frequent ER visits for falls, “gas” palpitations, and panic attacks, is eventually what led to both of us getting a diagnosis of reactive hypoglycemia.

Panic Attacks

My first visit to the emergency room was for a panic attack back in 1990. I couldn’t breathe, my heart was beating so fast I thought it would burst, and I felt an incredible wave of foreboding, like this was the moment I was going to die. The ER doc gave me Valium, which calmed me down, but for the next 18 years I would struggle to ward of panic attacks, which would come at any time, any place. I was given a diagnosis of “anxiety disorder” and put on a drug–Buspar–for one year. I stopped taking it after I realized it wasn’t making me feel a whole lot better–it was just making me feel better about feeling panicky, if that makes sense. Some time later, my brother also started to have panic attacks. We thought that, considering my mom had also suffered from them, that we had some kind of hereditary anxiety disorder. This notion was cemented after my son, Leo, began to show signs of anxiety at an early age, especially fear of the dark.

Our Little Devil

Leo’s first visit to an ER was when, at age 1 1/2, he climbed up onto a kitchen table and fell off.He bashed his forehead and had a goose egg on his noggin for weeks. A week after the table incident, an almost identical accident occurred, leaving Leo with two “horns” on his head. The second time, we didn’t go to the ER. Just two days after our little devil had sprouted his horns, Leo investigated the dining room window sill, slipped off the box he had pushed over and climbed up on and caught his nose on a hook in the wall. The hook went up his nose, and as he fell down, ripped open his nostril. Blood gushed all over my shirt as we charged to the emergency room, just six blocks away, with Leo’s nostril flapping in the wind like a shirt tail. It took a plastic surgeon an hour to glue his nose back together, repairing his nostril with plastic surgery super glue.

Sixteen, and Counting

Leo can recall every time he went to the emergency room with a pride normally reserved for winning Tae Kwon Do tournaments. To me, it sounded like the Twelve Days of Christmas: four cuts stitched up, three major falls, two broken collar bones, one broken leg, and a grand mal after falling off a wall. Perhaps the most memorable was when he walked into a shovel and sliced off his ear, or when he walked into the nail sticking out of the deck (yes, really, he just walked into it. We’ve already explained that one to child welfare). The scariest was the grand mal when he fell off a wall. After the ambulance carried him to the ER, a cat scan, EEG, and several other expensive (and as it turns out, unecessary) tests revealed nothing. In the meantime, Leo would often look sickly, passing out at school when the weather got too hot in the Florida summer and often complaining of stomach aches or that he just wasn’t feeling well. Blood tests revealed nothing. Our Leo, said the doctors, was a healthy, normal little boy.

And Now, for Something Completely Different

I went to the ER in 2004 with heart palpitations. These weren’t the kind of palpitations that normally accompanied a panic attack. My heart was beating at a normal 70 beats per minute, and I didn’t feel stressed. But I could feel my heart jumping in my chest about every fourth or fifth beat, like it was struggling to beat. I felt calm as they escorted me to a room and connected me to a heart monitor. Whatever it was, I just wanted them to fix my heart. Two hours later, the doctor discharged me, blaming excess stomach gas for my palpitations. I went home with a bottle of Tums. The primary ingredient in Tums is sugar. While I assumed that the Tums were targeting my stomach gas, in reality they were working to raise my blood sugar level and stop the palpitations.

I would have marked my palpitations off as an isolated incident if it wasn’t for the following year, when I went to the doctor after about of flu, with my blood pressure down to 70/50. He immediately hooked me up to an IV, while I began to worry about some autoimmune disorder. I seemed to get sicker, for longer, than anyone else I knew. I often felt malaise, I sometimes went to bed for hours. Sometimes days. “It seems you’re always sick,” my husband said. Perhaps the biggest clue I missed as to what might be wrong with me is that my husband would take me out to a nice restaurant to “cheer me up.” After a nice meal, usually followed by a chocolatey desert, I always felt better.

Rosetta Stone

Leo had his second seizure about a year after his first, when he fainted while playing at a friend’s house. Unfortunately, we did not have health insurance because my husband had recently been laid off (my job as a part time college professor didn’t come with health insurance) and we could not afford the $1,000 a month Cobra premium. Seeing as Leo had already been through almost every major diagnostic test imaginable, we decided to wait until we had health insurance again before seeing the pediatrician. That’s when I began to really research his symptoms: nightmares, fainting spells, clumsiness, mood swings, general malaise, weakness, tiredness. The most common ailment that popped up in the search results was an anxiety disorder. But what, I asked myself, is a ten-year-old boy doing with an anxiety disorder? I read about multiple sclerosis, and fibromyalgia, and bipolar disorder, none of which explained the bizarre list of symptoms my son had. And then I found a post on a discussion forum which described the exact same symptoms my son had. A friendly poster suggested that it could be a disorder called “reactive hypoglycemia.”

“Food Allergies”

I had suffered from a severe “food allergy” for over a year at this point, and I couldn’t quite pin it down to a cause. I thought it was lactose intolerance (it turns out it was that, a little bit), but after cutting dairy out of my diet, a couple of hours after eating a meal, I would shiver and shake, sit on the toilet for half an hour with stomach cramps, experience blurred vision, and generally feel all over malaise. A handful of Tums would make me feel better, after a while. (Sugar raises blood glucose levels: Tums’s primary ingredient? You guessed it…sugar).

The Diagnosis

A month after Leo had his second seizure, we obtained private health insurance. His pediatrician recommended that we see a neurologist. I asked her is she thought it could be reactive hypoglycemia and she shook her head. “You should take him to a neurologist,” she said. “Two Grand Mals is something to be concerned about.” This is where I told a little white lie, and told her that I had been diagnosed with reactive hypoglycemia (I just omitted the fact it was a self diagnosis). I also told her that my policy had a $5000 deductible (true), and that I would appreciate it if she could give Leo a Test for Hypoglycemia to rule out reactive hypoglycemia before we went to a neurologist. She agreed, but I don’t think she was expecting the lab results to come back with a firm diagnosis of reactive hypoglycemia.

Peanut Butter and Toast

It’s been a month since Leo received his diagnosis of reactive hypoglycemia. I learned that when blood sugar levels plummet in the middle of the night, the body reacts to the panicky sensations by producing a nightmare. We changed both our diets, and include a slice of Ezekiel 4:9 bread (a high protein, low carb toast) with peanut butter before going to bed. I haven’t had a nightmare in that time: Leo had one, when he forgot to eat his toast before going to bed. We made other, significant changes to our diet, which you can read about in another article.

The Moral to the Story is…

I could fill a book with the bizarre health incidents that have happened to my family over the last two generations (yes, my mother most probably had reactive hypoglycemia as well, we think). If you or your family members have had a list of strange ailments and disorders like us, my advice is to write everything down, and if you think reactive hypoglycemia is the cause, be insistent with your doctor! It is difficult to obtain a diagnosis, but the test is remarkably easy and cheap (if you haven’t already, see my article on How to Obtain a Diagnosis for Reactive Hypoglycemia).

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