Holly will be staying overnight again. She’s generally doing better and will probably be released tomorrow afternoon. She was fairly miserable a little bit ago (see “potassium”, below), but they’re doing what they can to keep her as comfortable as possible, and the staff there are very good. Except for the lady who brings breakfast. Her diabetes may come from her genes, as she was told that her form of diabetes was common to a specific Indian tribe.
The story, from the beginning, for those who don’t know:
Holly’s vision had been getting blurry and was getting worse for a few days. She also had some other common symptoms, such as dizziness. She brought up her glucose problems and i suggested maybe getting a monitor to test her blood sugar.
Early yesterday morning, after inching up to the TV to the point where she was nearly re-broadcast back to the station, she decided she’d had enough of feeling crappy so we went up to get a cheap blood-sugar monitor at Wal-Mart.
The first [successful] test was 448. A half hour later, the screen simply said “HI” – meaning that it was above 600. Normal blood sugar levels are more like 90 or so. We had trouble getting enough blood for further testing, because the machine was really finicky. Some degree of panic ensued, and we debated whether to wait for the Miami Valley Urgent Care to open, or go straight to the ER. (She no longer has insurance through her work, and we worried that the ER would not only be too expensive, but that she wouldn’t even be seen until after the Urgent Care was open anyway.) We called Optum’s Nurseline, which is provided by our employer, and was recommended to get to urgent care within 4-8 hours.
We waited for a couple of hours and she drank lots of water and rested as much as she could. We left early for Urgent Care. They couldn’t help us and directed us to go straight to the ER, ASAP.
After something like ten hours of poking and prodding and barely resting at all, she was finally admitted and she’s been getting better.
Today, her glucose was brought down to nearly normal, but it rose again later on, after being fed orange juice and a muffin for breakfast. Now she’s getting more potassium (that stuff apparently really hurts going in) and other unpronounceable things and we’ll have a better idea when she’s been monitored and stabilized a little more.
She probably won’t be taking injections of insulin for very long and will probably be on an oral drug to help keep her stable. She will need to eat low-carbohydrate, low-sugar foods from now on. So, if you’re going to be feeding her, fish would be a good idea. Non- sugar-free candy would not, and may get you a punch in the face courtesy of yours truly.
So that’s the story so far. She’s got a chronic disease but she’s getting better, and although she’ll be tied to drugs to keep her blood sugar stabilized, she’s going to be a lot better pretty soon.
