Diabetic on tv

I’m watching a show called “missing,” some lifetime television series. Well it’s about a physic girl that helps the FBI with missing cases. Each episode starts out with a scene where the person goes missing. I start one of the shows and right away i notice the medical alert bracelet the girl is wearing, shes driving and picks up a hitchhiker, he seems nice blah blah, when he enters her insulin case accidentally falls out. Now the FBI has been alerted. This is what they say about her "condition"

diabetic? gone 18 hours, doc says she injects two four times a day, assuming she stuck to her routine yesterday she has 26 hours from her last injection which gives us 8 hours to find her.

8 hours to find her???

They also say she will become hyperglycimic combative irrational (i think i heard right) and the infamous words "if the bad guy doesn’t get her then the diabetes will"

The diabetic girl ends up in the woods running away from her attacker, i think i would be hypo… when they find her she’s totally unresponsive.

crazy tv? or is it possible to be really bad without insulin right away? Any thoughts?



Some T1’s have some minimal amount of insulin production, and might have very high bg’s and be DKA but not pushed over the “hairy edge” into DKA coma for a long time. If you read the book “The Discovery of Insulin” you’ll find that many of the T1’s before the discovery of insulin could be kept alive (although the DKA had long ago ate away all fat and muscle mass and was attacking the bone structure in fact too) for weeks to months to (in some rare cases) years. The general belief is that those who could stay alive in that ghostly state for the longest, were in DKA but had some remaining natural insulin production, maybe just maybe kinda like the “honeymoon phase” that is variable in length and intensity from T1 to T1.

Other T1’s do not have any insulin production at all and if the long-lasting insulin was, say, NPH, it would have run out in less than 24 hours. DKA coma can come very quickly after that especially in those with no insulin production at all. This no-insulin-production-at-all might be expected if it was well after the honeymoon phase.

In my hometown several T1’s died of DKA coma. This was not all that long ago (20 to 40 years) and in fact they were kids of well-to-do families. One died in DKA coma before diagnosis (ironically his mom was a nurse but the onset was so sudden that he never presented the classic T1 symptoms).

How would you be hypo without insulin?

I’d be soaring that many hours without insulin even without food. The stress of being in that kind of situation (adrenaline) could send someone sky high. Being without water would add to the problem.

Suppose it’s possible to be DKA in that amount of time.

I have seen so many cases on TV where for whatever reason, a person has no access to insulin, they are on the run, been kidnapped, whatever, and so they give them orange juice. Um… wrong answer!

I used to go for days(weeks) above 400 and still function normally (mostly). It is all about the drama.

i know i have, it was just silly drama but they make it sound so serious. EIGHT hours to live!!