LADA??
Hi, this is gonna be a long story so buckle up.
I’m 23F, and have been small/underweight my entire life. In 2020 I had a pretty bad case of COVID and after that I started noticing what I assume to be hypoglycemic episodes.
I end up getting myself a blood glucose meter and checking my blood sugar, and sure enough, I’m frequently dropping into the 50s. So I go to my PCP who prescribed a CGM and a referral to an endo.
Endo #1. Pretty much immediately dismissed my concerns and told me I’m just too skinny and I need to eat more. I push her to run some tests and so she does. Everything is normal, so we do the 72 hour fasting insulinoma test. Negative.
Through the hospital I was able to see a genetic specialist and metabolic dietitian to analyze my diet and run a gene panel to check for any genetic causes of hypoglycemia. None in my genes. Metabolic dietitian looks at a log of EVERYTHING (literally had me weighing my foods and how much I ate) and she determined calorically I am getting enough.
So at this point I kind of just had to keep going and monitor myself and figure out how to manage it. Then one day things seemed to sort of flip. All of a sudden I would get high blood sugars, like, going over 200s high. This was obviously concerning and so I go back to my PCP who tells me I have a UTI, despite my only symptom of that being that I was thirsty and had to pee a lot. No fever no nothing. So this pushed me to get an appointment with endo #2.
Endo #2 was more worried about the lows than the highs and didn’t run any lab work or anything. Frustrating.
So life continues as usual and I make an appointment with endo #3. I book this appointment 9 months out (the soonest she had available) and then roughly a week before the appointment, they cancelled it because of “provider being out of office” so it took my probably a year until I was finally able to see endo #3. She runs some bloodwork and says everything is fine. In the blood work she ran an autoantibody panel. All came back negative.
At this point I book an appointment with a NP who is a diabetes specialist, she takes my whole history and runs A TON of blood work. My liver, thyroid, cholesterol levels, everything.
My OGTT at 2 hours was 141, so just barely above the “normal” cutoff. And then my fasting glucose from another day comes up at 101. (This is all on lab tests not my home meter)
Anyways, all that to say doctors have no idea what the fuck is going on in my body, and it’s been exhausting. Also, I very RARELY get lows anymore. So reactive hypoglycemia is unlikely