April 17th, I wake up, I’m dehydrated, I’ve got a belly ache that would reflect the belly ache of a beast, or maybe it’s more accurate if I said I had a beast with sharp nails clawing at my insides inside of me…did I mention I was dehydrated, like, couldn’t talk without the tongue clicking dehydrated…Blood sugar was 360. Ketones were MASSIVE. I don’t think they have a label for the color of purple that was on the pee stick.
I get up out of bed. Take a shot. Look at my pump, it was still plugged into me. I was fine when I went to bed the night before 113. I was irritated…there was no good reason for this nonsense…actually, I was straight up angry…I didn’t do anything to cause this…no unusual foods were eaten before bed, I had insulin in the pump, it was connected, my site was only a day old…basically still fresh considering how many days some of us wear those things…
I wasn’t out of bed but a few moments before I was worshiping the porcelain god. I’d been there done that. I knew this was bad. This was trip to the ER bad. I was vomiting up the acid from my stomach, nothing else, that stuff is nasty. And then of course, like the idiot I was, I drank water, which I knew I couldn’t keep down but I was so thirsty and so it was like I was in a boxing match, almost being KO’d each round, repeating the same thing over and over again. And then it finally did KO me. I was lying on the floor of the bathroom, with no energy to move. It was bad, I should’ve gone to the ER.
But, I didn’t go to the ER. I was going out of town. I didn’t have time for the ER. So I showered, changed my pump site, packed my car, and went to walmart, for the most disgusting stuff ever. Pedialyte. How kids drink that, I have no clue. It’s pure sugar. It’s so nasty.
I’ll fast forward through the rest of that day. It took 14 hours for my blood sugars to come into normal range (170). The ketones stayed high. I couldn’t keep food down, the pedialyte stayed down though, freakin nasty. No food stayed down until Saturday evening.
Saturday morning I called the oncall doctor who said I needed to go to the ER. *beeeeeeeeeeeeeeep* wrong answer. So I contacted a friend who’s a CDE and also has diabetes. She said that even though I had no symptoms of being sick that there was still something wrong in my body and had me up my basal rate to 120% to get me extra insulin to get the ketones out of my system and she also advised that a trip to the ER would be a good thing, but said I could wait till the afternoon and go if I still had moderate to large ketones.
Ketones went from moderate to large to small to moderate. I never did go to the ER and it took 15 days for the keytones to completely clear out of my system. I did have mild dehydration over those 15 days, but I also have a policy for going to the ER, I have to be dying, because, I don’t have time to go to the ER and then get shoved in ICU for a week or longer, as has been my experience when I go in there with ketones and high blood sugars and dehydration and vomiting up acid from the pit of my stomach.
I did have a thought after I got rid of the ketones. I was in ketosis, and my experience has been, when in ketosis for long periods of time, weight loss happens. And then, because I have a crazy brain, I thought to myself…I wonder if I lost weight…but then I never got on a scale to confirm it…
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Holy moly C! Glad to hear that you made it through all of that in one piece! That stuff can be scary bad – as in the heart suddenly stops beating bad!