Evening chaps,
So this year has been a rather hectic one, with one of the most abrupt wake up calls I’ve ever received as a diabetic. So im a senior in college, and coming from the dregs of junior year was rough. I spent my junior year in the bottom of a bottle for the most part, and mentally i wasn’t together in the slightest. However with the year done and a change of scenery, i was sure i was on the up and up.
Flash forward several months, i have tried to tone down my drinking, i was now working and living off campus with three friends. I thought i was on the up and up, or so i had thought. One particular evening, i had an urge to drink heavier then normal. Not a great thought to be had, but since i hadn’t been drinking as heavy as junior year, i figured one night wouldn’t hurt.
Now even with this misguided notion, i knew better then to just start drinking away. I had a meal first, which consisted of chicken, broccoli and riceroni with several glasses of water. Then i casually began to drink and let the knight take me away.
The next morning i woke up to that “oh no” hangover feeling. I shifted in bed, and i felt my stomach was going to make a grand appearance. I ran to the bathroom and upchucked whatever my body hadn’t yet digested and thought the worst of it was over. It wasn’t until i tried to drink a diet ginger ale to calm my stomach, to then throw that up, did i realize i had a problem. This wasn’t a hangover, my stomach is a tough one, and if i couldn’t keep a ginger ale down, i knew better then to be out and about. I called out of work and took some r and r. For the most part i couldn’t keep anything down, other then a mug of broth and a few bites of ramen. Being a man i figured i had faced the gauntlet and tomorrow would be a new day. Whatever evil was in me would be vanquished by the next morning. Again, i was utterly wrong.
The next morning all throughout the following day was a diabetic hell. I couldn’t keep anything down, whether it be solid or liquid, and my blood sugar remained high. (I had checked it the day prior, and it being in the high 300’s took insulin to cover, only for it to be 400 the next day.) i laid in bed in discomfort and general pain all day. Going on a second day of no food or drink, my body was beginning to fail, and i began to shiver and shake, and i felt frail and weak.
It wasn’t until my one friend who worked as an emt came home and saw me, as well as see me fail to hold down a Powerade, did she override my decision to sleep it off, and drove me to hospital. After giving the lady at my desk my info and vomiting twice, i was taken to one of the backrooms. They took little time in getting me squared away, for they had an inkling of what was wrong and did their duty with haste. Me, oblivious to the situation, and attempting to keep my own moral up, joked with the nurses, who were surprised that in my state, i could still be quippy.
I know not how much time passed, because it was at this point i was so woozy and discombobulated that twenty minutes ended up being an hour. Then the doctor on call for me walked into the room and told me this.
“Your blood sugar is 540, you’re going into DKA and your body is shutting down. You’re going to ICU immediately, an ambulance has already been called.”
Now for anyone unfamiliar with DKA, first consider yourself lucky, but DKA is when your sugars are so high, your blood turns acidic and your body forces itself to start shutting down. Thats how it was explained to me, im no doctor, so they tried to dumb it down for me. Or as the doc explained it “i didn’t even have to run tests to know you were in DKA. I could smell you from down the hall. You smelled like fruit loops.”
Now time was slipping me by, but the ambulance ride i remember vividly. It was a half hour of tossing and turning, and bumps and turns where i had to fight nausea the whole way. Something the paramedics commended me on.
Once at the hospital the events get a bit fuzzy, as this is when my organs began to fail, and i was in and out of consciousness. All i can remember is being hooked up to several machines, my friend holding my hand, and the nurses scurrying about. As i would later come to find out, my heart rate was so high, that it kept setting off the machine. And my friend and the nurses were scared my heart was going to give out, and that i would die in the hospital bed.
However once they hooked up the iv’s and started to refill my body with fluids, things slowly started to fall back into place, and i came back to reality... only after facing off death for five hours.
Now thats where the story ends, and the informational side begins. (Apologies for the length, it was an incredibly long week) how i got to be im hospital with a 540 blood sugar was a conglomerate of things working in tandem. The biggest culprit, being the chicken we had for dinner before everything happened went bad. My other friends ate it, but only had a case of the rumblies. As a diabetic, any time you get sick, it gets ramped up by a factor of 10. Even the common cold can send your sugars skyrocketing.
The second main culprit, was what i had to drink that night. I had four strong Belgian beers, a full bottle of red wine, and two glasses of baileys irish cream liquor. Now in hindsight, this was an absolutely horrible idea which i paid for dearly. After hospital i didn’t touch anything for nearly a month after. It took me two weeks to even look at a glass of whiskey again, several months to have more then a sip, and to this day i refuse to drink wine and baileys.
The other two component that conspired against me, were lack of sleep the week prior, and stress. Believe it or not to anyone new here, these two things can seriously mess up your readings. Sleep alone has caused some Of my highest highs, and just thinking about something stressful has caused my sugar to go up by about forty points.
Needless to say after this fiasco, i more then hunkered down on getting my numbers in line, *actually tone down my drinking, and get my house in order. Ill be damned if this didn’t affect me however.
As a man we all like to feel strong, but nothing makes you feel de-throned like having your friends make sure you didn’t die in your sleep.
Anytime i feel off i have to wonder if i’ll end up in hospital again. As the days have gone by, drinking has become less and less enjoyable. As anytime i wake up the following evening, i have to wonder if i’ll make it to the following day.
(One day i had one glass too many of rum on the rocks, and woke up feeling like i did that day. That feeling of dread and wondering if i were to die still haunt me.)
If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading, and hopefully if you haven’t already learned these key aspects of being a diabetic, you can learn the easy way from me, rather then learn it the hard way like i did. And if anyone has any stories like mine, I’ve learned it helps to talk about it, so why not make this a place to do so?
As a final note, bless this community for being so open and helpful, and if anyone has any comments questions or concerns, feel free to bring them my way.
Cheers
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