So I had my annual review at the diabetes clinic earlier this afternoon, and I'm sitting here feeling frustrated and angry.
I will start off by saying that in general, I really like this clinic: the DSNs are awesome, through this clinic I've been on a DAFNE course and moved from Mixtard (when I first arrived) all the way to an insulin pump, and my diabetes management has really improved. However, I have one major grip with the clinic, and it's this: I never see the same doctor twice.
Usually, I find this mildly annoying, but no big deal. Then I had the appointment with Dr Pillock and it really threw me. I was so angry after that appointment, and I sat in that waiting room afterwards waiting to see the DSN feeling like a complete and utter failure. I know that isn't true, and I generally don't feel like that, but now every time I go to that clinic, I sit in the waiting room not knowing which doctor I'm going to see, and I remember that appointment and how I felt, and I stress. The last two appointments I saw a DSN (which was actually quite good) and a doctor who seemed very nice. Today, one of the doctors I've seen before (and got on really well with) was in clinic, so I was hoping I'd get him, and instead I got a patronising *insert naughty word here*
He started off by asking me the same questions they always ask (while reading over my notes) we had the usual surprise that I'm not in regular touch with the DSNs *sigh*,
and I asked about my HbA1c. Turns out it's actually gone done a little bit, and is now 6.7%, which I
was very pleasantly surprised by, as I was convinced it would have gone
up. The last three months covers our honeymoon and all the surrounding
chaos and I felt that I was completely slacking in my diabetes
management. In the last month or so I've got back on track and really
made an effort, and maybe that's what made the difference. Regardless, I
was pleased, but I think part of the reason that I'm so frustrated by
today is that the rest of the appointment took away from that.
Anyway, I mentioned that I thought that some of the reduction in my HbA1c has probably been helped by the fact that my liver doctor is currently in the process of reducing my steroid dose, which he then looked up to see what had been written in my notes, and then proceeded to get confused as to whether I had stopped or not, and why I was on the dose I was on. We then got into a slightly heated debate where he seemed to decide that I didn't understand any of it, stated that "we know what we're doing with prednisolone because we're endocrinologists," explained some of the tests I'd had in baby language, and started to suggest things they could do with my steroids.
At this point I was pretty much ready to bash him over the head with my Biochemistry PhD certificate and tell him that there was no way in hell I was letting him do anything to my steroid dose because I wasn't under his bloody care for that and he'd met me once. *takes a deep breath and counts to ten* Instead, I explained, as calmly as I could (which, to be honest, probably wasn't all that calmly...) that I had discussed all the options with my liver doctor, and that we had decided on a course of action that we were both happy with. He scribbled something in his notes, and stopped pushing the matter.
I'm sorry, but I trust my liver doctor. I've seen him every couple of months for the last two years, and I really like him. He treats me like an individual, and he always discusses my options and asks my opinion. He knows my case far better than some endocrinologist who has just looked at my notes for the first time and decided that he knows better.
Then he went through my last appointment notes, and asked if my basal rates were the same. When I told him that
they were considerably lower (about 40%, because of the reduction in steroids), he said that he didn't want to
write all that down, and moved on...
I just...I feel that the appointments are worse than useless. At best, I get my HbA1c results, and check everything else is ok, and nothing else; at worst, I walk out feeling like this. I don't get anything out of the appointments, and to be honest, I'm not even sure what I *want* to get out of them, but I know that when I have doctors like the one I have today, I don't want to ask questions, I just want to get out of there as soon as I can. And that's not right.
I'm pondering emailing one of the DSNs at the clinic (since
apparently I should be doing that anyway...*coughs*) and asking what the
actual policy is in the clinic, and if there's any way I can make sure
that I see the same doctor/group of doctors. I don't want to make an
actual complaint, but I'm tired of walking out of the clinic feeling
frustrated, and it's pushing me to do something about it.
Any thoughts?
Showing posts with label hospital. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hospital. Show all posts
Monday, 20 August 2012
Wednesday, 15 August 2012
Hypo Awareness Week!
It is Hypo Awareness Week this week, which seems to be a new thing, and I've had a couple of throughts knocking around my head about the subject in general. Part of the week is about educating healthcare professionals working in secondary care about hypos, what they might look like, what to do if you find someone hypo, etc, and it got me thinking about a couple of things, which I'm going to actually going to split into two posts, because I can ramble on a fair bit... ;)
1) Hypos in hospital
I've had two experiences of being hypo while staying in a hospital, and they were quite different from one another.
The first was while I was participating in a study. The study part had ended, but I was hooked up to IV insulin, and they were continuing to monitor my blood glucose levels over night (part of the study protocol as I was instructed not to take my lantus the previous day). I woke up at some point in the wee hours, and I knew I was low. They had just taken a sample to test, and I was still in that sleepy/hypo groggy stage where I was deciding what to do when they came back and asked how I felt. I replied that I was pretty sure I was low, to which they responded "your BG reading is 2.8"
By this point I was fully awake, and ready to grab some skittles and just get on with it (as you do). I knew I was low but it wasn't a particularly bad one, so I wasn't bothering that much, other than being slightly frustrated that I couldn't just get up and treat it.
The nursing staff, however, pretty much went into panic mode at this point. They asked me what I wanted to treat the hypo (fair enough), so I asked for some juice if they had any. They gave me a glass of orange juice and four biscuits, and then asked me if I wanted a couple of slices of toast and a cup of tea. I drank the juice, ate one of the biscuits, and then explained (while hypo) that if I ate all of the stuff they were trying to give me, my BG would end up skyrocketing.
They were very nice, and very concerned, but oh man, it's so hard anyway to avoid overtreating a hypo without someone trying to force food on you! I was also surprised, as the study was diabetes related, that their night staff were not better educated on how to treat a hypo.
The second experience occurred while I was in short stay for a liver biopsy. I'd had the biopsy, and was in the middle of the six hour bed-rest-and-observation period. During this, they take your blood pressure and heart rate every 30 minutes to make sure you're not bleeding to death. At one point, I'd just checked my BG and I was a little bit on the low side, so I'd had some jelly babies and was waiting to come back up. The nurse popped in, measured my BP and heart rate, and stopped to comment that my heart was racing (I believe it was 135 bpm at that point...) She asked if I could feel it, and I explained that yes, I was aware of it and it was because my BG was low. She looked at me and said "so I guess we should get you something to eat then?" I said that I'd already had something, and said "ok" and left.
I'm in two minds about this. I'd insisted on having my pump and meter and being able to monitor myself, as I had the last time, but they were meant to be recording things like BG etc. It's part of the reason I said I wanted to manage my diabetes by myself, because I'm always vaguely terrified that I'll end up with someone who doesn't understand what's going and will do something wrong. While I wanted to manage my own diabetes, they were still meant to be monitoring/recording data, and the fact that none of this occurred, and the nurse's lack of attention or concern about the fact that I was low (simple things like: how low are you? What have you taken? I'll check back in ten minutes) worries me, and did nothing to relieve any concerns I have about ending up unconscious in hospital with no control.
So I've had two experiences of being low in hospital, and they were pretty much opposite ends of the spectrum. One was a panicked over-reaction, and the other was a worrying under-reaction. As a result of this, I'm really pleased to see hypo awareness week, and I hope that it improves the way taht hypos are dealt with in these situations.
1) Hypos in hospital
I've had two experiences of being hypo while staying in a hospital, and they were quite different from one another.
The first was while I was participating in a study. The study part had ended, but I was hooked up to IV insulin, and they were continuing to monitor my blood glucose levels over night (part of the study protocol as I was instructed not to take my lantus the previous day). I woke up at some point in the wee hours, and I knew I was low. They had just taken a sample to test, and I was still in that sleepy/hypo groggy stage where I was deciding what to do when they came back and asked how I felt. I replied that I was pretty sure I was low, to which they responded "your BG reading is 2.8"
By this point I was fully awake, and ready to grab some skittles and just get on with it (as you do). I knew I was low but it wasn't a particularly bad one, so I wasn't bothering that much, other than being slightly frustrated that I couldn't just get up and treat it.
The nursing staff, however, pretty much went into panic mode at this point. They asked me what I wanted to treat the hypo (fair enough), so I asked for some juice if they had any. They gave me a glass of orange juice and four biscuits, and then asked me if I wanted a couple of slices of toast and a cup of tea. I drank the juice, ate one of the biscuits, and then explained (while hypo) that if I ate all of the stuff they were trying to give me, my BG would end up skyrocketing.
They were very nice, and very concerned, but oh man, it's so hard anyway to avoid overtreating a hypo without someone trying to force food on you! I was also surprised, as the study was diabetes related, that their night staff were not better educated on how to treat a hypo.
The second experience occurred while I was in short stay for a liver biopsy. I'd had the biopsy, and was in the middle of the six hour bed-rest-and-observation period. During this, they take your blood pressure and heart rate every 30 minutes to make sure you're not bleeding to death. At one point, I'd just checked my BG and I was a little bit on the low side, so I'd had some jelly babies and was waiting to come back up. The nurse popped in, measured my BP and heart rate, and stopped to comment that my heart was racing (I believe it was 135 bpm at that point...) She asked if I could feel it, and I explained that yes, I was aware of it and it was because my BG was low. She looked at me and said "so I guess we should get you something to eat then?" I said that I'd already had something, and said "ok" and left.
I'm in two minds about this. I'd insisted on having my pump and meter and being able to monitor myself, as I had the last time, but they were meant to be recording things like BG etc. It's part of the reason I said I wanted to manage my diabetes by myself, because I'm always vaguely terrified that I'll end up with someone who doesn't understand what's going and will do something wrong. While I wanted to manage my own diabetes, they were still meant to be monitoring/recording data, and the fact that none of this occurred, and the nurse's lack of attention or concern about the fact that I was low (simple things like: how low are you? What have you taken? I'll check back in ten minutes) worries me, and did nothing to relieve any concerns I have about ending up unconscious in hospital with no control.
So I've had two experiences of being low in hospital, and they were pretty much opposite ends of the spectrum. One was a panicked over-reaction, and the other was a worrying under-reaction. As a result of this, I'm really pleased to see hypo awareness week, and I hope that it improves the way taht hypos are dealt with in these situations.
Friday, 25 February 2011
Doctor Pillock and the Wonderful DSN
I had a pump review at the diabetic clinic on Monday. It went...not well. I apologise for the novel length of this post, but I want to get this out of my head.
I didn't see the doctor I normally see, which frustrated me a bit since Dr E knows all about my liver problems/steroids etc, and I find him really easy to talk to. But I've seen a couple of other doctors in the clinic and I've always got on well with them, so I figured it would be ok, I'd just have to do a bit of explaining.
Boy was I wrong.
So, to backtrack a little, one of the reasons I've been a bit worried about this appointment is that I had another seizure about a month ago. No idea what brought it on, I was ok, then realised I was hypo, checked my BG at 2.6, ate at least 40g fast acting carbs (20g first, then more when I wasn't coming up) and was actually *drinking a glass of juice* when I went down. No exercise, it wasn't hot, I hadn't been doing anything out of the ordinary, my BGs had been fine all day. I just dropped and couldn't get my BG up fast enough. Poor Stuart was the one who had to deal with it, and he was amazing - he heard a crash (I broke the kitchen table when I fell), saw me seizing, made sure I couldn't hurt myself, and called 999. A&E couldn't find anything wrong, so they sent me home (after 6 hours...). My theory is that it's something to do with my liver/steroids/insulin resistance changing as the damage to my liver decreases, but I can't know for sure.
Now, I was nervous when I know I was going to see Dr E, because having to explain that I'd had another seizure wasn't something I was looking forward to, but he's been really understanding about the last time and we had a long discussion about the seizure and my liver problems. Now that I was suddenly seeing Dr K, I wasn't sure how things were going to go. So when he asked how I was, I started to tell him about the seizure, which in hindsight may have been a mistake, because he immediately started interrogating me, and immediately put me on the defensive.
He asked me if I turned my pump off if I test and my BG is low. I said no, and he just looked at me. I explained that I'd never been told to do that, as it wouldn't have any effect for a while, and certainly not fast enough to treat a hypo. He looked at my basal rates and kept asking me questions and I felt like I was on the back foot the whole time, like I'd done something really wrong. He asked me three times if I'd spoken to any of the pump educators. Twice who changed my basal rates, and how I'd decided I needed to be on the rates I was on. Despite me saying several times that I'd been doing basal tests, he still asked me if I was doing 'carb-free' testing. He was particularly interested in my afternoon rates (when I have the peak of insulin resistance from the steroids), and when he asked when I'd last done a basal test, I said that I hadn't done the afternoon one in a couple of weeks, but that I'd done a morning one at the weekend, and an overnight one the previous week. And he wrote down 'no carb-free testing' on my sheet...
Yeah, by that point I was pretty pissed.
I feel that he looked at the numbers and that's all he saw. He didn't seem interested in listening to anything I had to say. In the first week that he looked at, I'd had six hypos. However, four of these were in the same day, and you know how you get days where sometime you just run low? Two of them were a hypo that wouldn't come up on that same day, so it was a hypo, treated, followed by a test 15 min later that was still hypo. Of the six tests, four of them were 3.8 or 3.9. I'll admit that I'm hypoing more than I'd like, but I'm testing and changing things, I'm using temp basals, I'm being careful not to overtreat hypos so I don't spike afterwards. This is the first time in six months I've been on the same dose of liver medication for more than a couple of weeks, and I know that has messed with my numbers.
He insisted that I speak to one of the pump DSNs before I left (I'd been in the clinic for two hours by this point, and it was after 5 pm), and I was so unsure of what the hell I was doing that I just agreed. I sat waiting for the DSN, and I was so angry I was close to tears. It's been a while since I've cried as a result of a diabetic appointment, and I was adamant I wasn't going to start now, but I really didn't know how I was going to cope with more chastising. Sarah, the DSN, came to get me and, well, she was lovely. We actually sat down and had a proper chat about everything, she actually *asked* what had happened when I had the seizure, and she looked at my logs and pointed out a few things that I could check or change, but said that overall I was doing exactly what they would suggest, and that she could see from my logs I was having less hypos than I was a few weeks ago. It was like a weight of my shoulders to hear that I hadn't been completely screwing up the entire time. She gave me her contact details and said that I could get in touch any time, even if it was just to have a chat about things, and really made me feel that, yeah, I was having a few more hypos than they would like, but she could see what I had been doing to improve things and she was happy with that. She saved that whole experience for me, and actually turned it into something productive.
It took me a couple of days to realise why I was so bothered about this. I have...issues...about guilt and diabetes, mainly stemming from appointments like this when I was younger. I went to lots of appointments where all I heard was that my HbA1c was too high, and that my control wasn't good enough and I wasn't trying hard enough, and being asked the same questions repeatedly because they didn't believe my answer. I went through my teenage years thinking that I couldn't do anything right because no-one told me that hormones mess with your blood sugars. I went through a fairly extended period of burnout because I couldn't see the point of testing - it was always high, and I couldn't do anything about it anyway, so why bother? (I am not condoning this by the way, it's just how I felt at the time).
I still have a small voice in the back of my head that occasionally pipes up and tells me that I'm "cheating" whenever I have a piece of cake, or a packet of crisps at something other than a designated snack time, or a piece of chocolate. It's taken me a long time to get to this stage, where I can mostly ignore it because I know that it's not always my fault when things go wrong, that I am trying. I'm not perfect, I'm the first to admit that, but I've put a lot of work into my diabetes management. I read, I talk to other diabetics, I (normally) have a good relationship with my doctor/DSN and will email and ask questions. I'm also quite independent with it - I won't contact the pump educators unless I have a problem I can't solve on my own. And my clinic is very much behind this approach of being responsible for your own care. They are always there if I need them, but they encourage us to be able to test, look at the results, spot patterns, make adjustments etc as we see fit. It's the whole point of things like DAFNE for crying out loud! And this doctor made me feel like I was a fool for doing this, that there was no way I could possibly be testing and making these decisions on my own, without the approval of someone from the clinic and this infuriated and upset me. (I was so close to pulling the "I have a PhD in biochemistry, I am not a fecking idiot", but I thought that might have been inappropriate). I think part of the reason I was so upset is that I have never been made to feel that way before in this clinic. I've seen three different doctors and several DSNs over four years, and they've never made me feel as small and incompetent as this doctor did in 15 minutes. He made me feel like it was all my fault.
I've been debating whether or not to actually post about this, but it's been eating at me for a few days now, and I think writing about it might help me to get it out of my system. I don't want to seem like I'm just throwing a tantrum, because I do feel a little bit like a child that's been told to sit in the corner and not touch anything, and I'm aware that my reaction might be to that feeling. I don't want to be one of those people who takes any kind of criticism by throwing a fit. The thing is, I don't think I am. I can deal with criticism, as long as it's constructive and I can see why it's happening. I can deal with a doctor saying that I've made a mistake, I can admit that. But there's something about the way this doctor treated me that just rubbed me the wrong way. Maybe if I felt he didn't just have a knee-jerk reaction to the word "seizure" and the fact that I'm on quite a lot of insulin because of the steroids. Maybe if I'd had an actual conversation or discussion with him instead of feeling like I was being interrogated and then talked at. All I know is that I've never walked out of an appointment in that clinic feeling like I did on Monday, and that included the first one where my HbA1c was too high, and I was still struggling on Mixtard. If it hadn't been for Sarah, I'm not sure what I would have done. He knocked all confidence in any ability to manage my own diabetes, and she gave it back (mostly, I'm still a bit...wary).
I didn't see the doctor I normally see, which frustrated me a bit since Dr E knows all about my liver problems/steroids etc, and I find him really easy to talk to. But I've seen a couple of other doctors in the clinic and I've always got on well with them, so I figured it would be ok, I'd just have to do a bit of explaining.
Boy was I wrong.
So, to backtrack a little, one of the reasons I've been a bit worried about this appointment is that I had another seizure about a month ago. No idea what brought it on, I was ok, then realised I was hypo, checked my BG at 2.6, ate at least 40g fast acting carbs (20g first, then more when I wasn't coming up) and was actually *drinking a glass of juice* when I went down. No exercise, it wasn't hot, I hadn't been doing anything out of the ordinary, my BGs had been fine all day. I just dropped and couldn't get my BG up fast enough. Poor Stuart was the one who had to deal with it, and he was amazing - he heard a crash (I broke the kitchen table when I fell), saw me seizing, made sure I couldn't hurt myself, and called 999. A&E couldn't find anything wrong, so they sent me home (after 6 hours...). My theory is that it's something to do with my liver/steroids/insulin resistance changing as the damage to my liver decreases, but I can't know for sure.
Now, I was nervous when I know I was going to see Dr E, because having to explain that I'd had another seizure wasn't something I was looking forward to, but he's been really understanding about the last time and we had a long discussion about the seizure and my liver problems. Now that I was suddenly seeing Dr K, I wasn't sure how things were going to go. So when he asked how I was, I started to tell him about the seizure, which in hindsight may have been a mistake, because he immediately started interrogating me, and immediately put me on the defensive.
He asked me if I turned my pump off if I test and my BG is low. I said no, and he just looked at me. I explained that I'd never been told to do that, as it wouldn't have any effect for a while, and certainly not fast enough to treat a hypo. He looked at my basal rates and kept asking me questions and I felt like I was on the back foot the whole time, like I'd done something really wrong. He asked me three times if I'd spoken to any of the pump educators. Twice who changed my basal rates, and how I'd decided I needed to be on the rates I was on. Despite me saying several times that I'd been doing basal tests, he still asked me if I was doing 'carb-free' testing. He was particularly interested in my afternoon rates (when I have the peak of insulin resistance from the steroids), and when he asked when I'd last done a basal test, I said that I hadn't done the afternoon one in a couple of weeks, but that I'd done a morning one at the weekend, and an overnight one the previous week. And he wrote down 'no carb-free testing' on my sheet...
Yeah, by that point I was pretty pissed.
I feel that he looked at the numbers and that's all he saw. He didn't seem interested in listening to anything I had to say. In the first week that he looked at, I'd had six hypos. However, four of these were in the same day, and you know how you get days where sometime you just run low? Two of them were a hypo that wouldn't come up on that same day, so it was a hypo, treated, followed by a test 15 min later that was still hypo. Of the six tests, four of them were 3.8 or 3.9. I'll admit that I'm hypoing more than I'd like, but I'm testing and changing things, I'm using temp basals, I'm being careful not to overtreat hypos so I don't spike afterwards. This is the first time in six months I've been on the same dose of liver medication for more than a couple of weeks, and I know that has messed with my numbers.
He insisted that I speak to one of the pump DSNs before I left (I'd been in the clinic for two hours by this point, and it was after 5 pm), and I was so unsure of what the hell I was doing that I just agreed. I sat waiting for the DSN, and I was so angry I was close to tears. It's been a while since I've cried as a result of a diabetic appointment, and I was adamant I wasn't going to start now, but I really didn't know how I was going to cope with more chastising. Sarah, the DSN, came to get me and, well, she was lovely. We actually sat down and had a proper chat about everything, she actually *asked* what had happened when I had the seizure, and she looked at my logs and pointed out a few things that I could check or change, but said that overall I was doing exactly what they would suggest, and that she could see from my logs I was having less hypos than I was a few weeks ago. It was like a weight of my shoulders to hear that I hadn't been completely screwing up the entire time. She gave me her contact details and said that I could get in touch any time, even if it was just to have a chat about things, and really made me feel that, yeah, I was having a few more hypos than they would like, but she could see what I had been doing to improve things and she was happy with that. She saved that whole experience for me, and actually turned it into something productive.
It took me a couple of days to realise why I was so bothered about this. I have...issues...about guilt and diabetes, mainly stemming from appointments like this when I was younger. I went to lots of appointments where all I heard was that my HbA1c was too high, and that my control wasn't good enough and I wasn't trying hard enough, and being asked the same questions repeatedly because they didn't believe my answer. I went through my teenage years thinking that I couldn't do anything right because no-one told me that hormones mess with your blood sugars. I went through a fairly extended period of burnout because I couldn't see the point of testing - it was always high, and I couldn't do anything about it anyway, so why bother? (I am not condoning this by the way, it's just how I felt at the time).
I still have a small voice in the back of my head that occasionally pipes up and tells me that I'm "cheating" whenever I have a piece of cake, or a packet of crisps at something other than a designated snack time, or a piece of chocolate. It's taken me a long time to get to this stage, where I can mostly ignore it because I know that it's not always my fault when things go wrong, that I am trying. I'm not perfect, I'm the first to admit that, but I've put a lot of work into my diabetes management. I read, I talk to other diabetics, I (normally) have a good relationship with my doctor/DSN and will email and ask questions. I'm also quite independent with it - I won't contact the pump educators unless I have a problem I can't solve on my own. And my clinic is very much behind this approach of being responsible for your own care. They are always there if I need them, but they encourage us to be able to test, look at the results, spot patterns, make adjustments etc as we see fit. It's the whole point of things like DAFNE for crying out loud! And this doctor made me feel like I was a fool for doing this, that there was no way I could possibly be testing and making these decisions on my own, without the approval of someone from the clinic and this infuriated and upset me. (I was so close to pulling the "I have a PhD in biochemistry, I am not a fecking idiot", but I thought that might have been inappropriate). I think part of the reason I was so upset is that I have never been made to feel that way before in this clinic. I've seen three different doctors and several DSNs over four years, and they've never made me feel as small and incompetent as this doctor did in 15 minutes. He made me feel like it was all my fault.
I've been debating whether or not to actually post about this, but it's been eating at me for a few days now, and I think writing about it might help me to get it out of my system. I don't want to seem like I'm just throwing a tantrum, because I do feel a little bit like a child that's been told to sit in the corner and not touch anything, and I'm aware that my reaction might be to that feeling. I don't want to be one of those people who takes any kind of criticism by throwing a fit. The thing is, I don't think I am. I can deal with criticism, as long as it's constructive and I can see why it's happening. I can deal with a doctor saying that I've made a mistake, I can admit that. But there's something about the way this doctor treated me that just rubbed me the wrong way. Maybe if I felt he didn't just have a knee-jerk reaction to the word "seizure" and the fact that I'm on quite a lot of insulin because of the steroids. Maybe if I'd had an actual conversation or discussion with him instead of feeling like I was being interrogated and then talked at. All I know is that I've never walked out of an appointment in that clinic feeling like I did on Monday, and that included the first one where my HbA1c was too high, and I was still struggling on Mixtard. If it hadn't been for Sarah, I'm not sure what I would have done. He knocked all confidence in any ability to manage my own diabetes, and she gave it back (mostly, I'm still a bit...wary).
Friday, 2 July 2010
Well, that was new
So. I had a bit of a scare of Wednesday night, in which my blood sugar dropped so low I passed out and had a seizure in the middle of Sainsburys. I'm still not entirely sure what caused it. I'd been running high all day, and correcting on the advice of my pump, and then I'd gone shopping. I was 11 mmol/l when I left work at around 6:30, and I called Stuart at about 7:30 to say that I was nipping into Sainsburys before heading home. Fifteen minutes later and I knew something was wrong, so I checked my BG and got 2.9. I had four glucotabs and waited for them to kick in. Soon after that I realised things were getting worse instead of better, and my vision was starting to do weird things. I had eight more glucotabs, and I could feel myself getting woozy. The last thing I remember thinking is that I needed to get help, and then the next thing I know I'm being woken up by a paramedic, who told me that I'd passed out and I'd had a seizure.
They didn't give me glucagon, because when they checked my BG it was 5.6. They packed me off to A&E, where I spent the rest of the evening getting poked and prodded and tested before they let me go home. Two of my liver enzymes are elevated, but that's unrelated to what happened, just something they want me to follow up with my GP. Poor Stuart had no idea what had happened until I managed to get in touch with him at about 10:30, when he then had to come all the way out to Addenbrooke's to look after me. He also took yesterday off work (as did I) to make sure I was ok.
I spent yesterday going to see my GP and just generally feeling completely wiped out. My BG kept dropping, so I was deliberately running it high, and oh god, my muscles are still in pain! I also bit my tongue quite badly, so I'm now talking with a kind of lisp and it's bugging me when I try to eat. I'm adamant it's not going to stop me going to Brighton tomorrow to meet up with my fellow diabetics!
I'm still not sure exactly what happened. In 22 years of diabetes, I have passed out once, and that was when I was eight and being stupid, and I've never had a seizure. I think it was an unfortunate combination of the heat, the exercise, and something weird going on with my insulin absorption, so maybe some of it was pooling and then all kicked in at once. Otherwise where the hell did all those glucotabs go??
They didn't give me glucagon, because when they checked my BG it was 5.6. They packed me off to A&E, where I spent the rest of the evening getting poked and prodded and tested before they let me go home. Two of my liver enzymes are elevated, but that's unrelated to what happened, just something they want me to follow up with my GP. Poor Stuart had no idea what had happened until I managed to get in touch with him at about 10:30, when he then had to come all the way out to Addenbrooke's to look after me. He also took yesterday off work (as did I) to make sure I was ok.
I spent yesterday going to see my GP and just generally feeling completely wiped out. My BG kept dropping, so I was deliberately running it high, and oh god, my muscles are still in pain! I also bit my tongue quite badly, so I'm now talking with a kind of lisp and it's bugging me when I try to eat. I'm adamant it's not going to stop me going to Brighton tomorrow to meet up with my fellow diabetics!
I'm still not sure exactly what happened. In 22 years of diabetes, I have passed out once, and that was when I was eight and being stupid, and I've never had a seizure. I think it was an unfortunate combination of the heat, the exercise, and something weird going on with my insulin absorption, so maybe some of it was pooling and then all kicked in at once. Otherwise where the hell did all those glucotabs go??
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