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What You Don't Know About Diabetes...

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By Karin Evans

Ten months ago, I wound up in an emergency room when my body began to melt into sugar. I know that sounds melodramatic, but that’s what happened.

For at least a year I’d been feeling pretty tired, but I kept chalking it up to my late-in-life role as the mother of two young daughters, plus hormonal changes, too many deadlines, and too little sleep. Besides, I was doing a lot of things to take care of myself: eating healthfully, running every day, practicing yoga when I could. But overall, my energy was droopy and getting worse.

I went for a checkup. The doctor did the standard tests, asked the standard questions. “Getting enough sleep?” “As much as I can,” I answered with a shrug. I had other, minor, complaints—blurry vision, numb fingers, a pain in the ball of one foot—and was sent to the appropriate specialists. I was given reassurances, eyedrops, a wrist brace. And so I went home, vowing to pop a few more vitamins, have a massage, get to bed earlier.

Then I started feeling fluish. I figured it was just the generic winter cold or flu, but it hung on for two weeks, then three. A month later I could hardly get out of bed. I began to crave liquids, my feet flopped when I walked, and my mind began to work strangely. My eyes became so blurry that I couldn’t read my computer screen or watch the nightly news. When I stepped on the scale, I found I had lost five pounds, even though I had stopped exercising by this point. The next week I lost five more.

“I think I’m dying,” I said casually to my husband. The colors of the room seemed brighter and my head was filled with German and Mandarin, languages I had studied but didn’t normally speak. “This can’t go on,” he said, so the next day I dragged myself to a new physician.

The doctor listened and sent for the nurse, who pricked my finger and tested my blood. The doctor looked at the results and whistled softly. “You have diabetes,” he said. Then he sent me to the emergency room.

I lay in the ER with an insulin drip in my arm while they did a bunch of tests. Then they told me I had something called diabetic ketoacidosis, which is basically a way station on the road to a diabetic coma. In this state, blood sugar levels are sky high. My reading was 675. Yours, if you are reading this, don’t have diabetes, and have not just consumed a huge banana split, is probably around 80 or 110 max.

The young nurse who took care of me kept shaking her head. “When they said we had a case of ketoacidosis, I kept looking around the ER for someone really overweight and in bad shape. I couldn’t believe it was you.”

“Me either,” I said weakly. It’s not that I thought diabetes was a rare illness. I’d read the statistics. In this country, an estimated one out of three people born in the year 2000 will develop the disease. And I’d heard enough about the complications that can ensue—blindness, heart attack, amputation, and kidney failure—to know that diabetes is a very scary disease.

What I didn’t...

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