New here with a question

Type 1 and LADA
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Hello everyone I’m new here. My name is Chris and I’m 43 years old with type1 diabetes for a little over 8 years now. I’ve never had any serious complications up until the New Year just gone. I’d been sick for over a month with a cold, which turned to flu, tonsilitis, and a nasty ear infection all at the same time. On December 27th, I was awake all night throwing up, feeling dizzy and nauseous. I’d lost my appetite for a few days and in my ignorance I stopped taking insulin because I wasn’t eating anything, that was simply down to lack of education, and I learnt the hard way to never stop taking the insulin…even when I’m not eating!

My sister picked me up from home (I live alone) and she took me back to her house, where I deteriorated rapidly over the next few hours. I continued to throw up, and my breathing became very shallow like gasps with abdominal cramps. My sugar level was off the scale (over 33mmol, or 600mg)

I was eventually taken by ambulance to the hospital, where I spent 4 hours in the Emergency Room with Ketoacidosis. It was a bit of a shock to be experiencing this for the first time, and very frightening, not just for me, but for my sister as well, who was waiting anxiously outside. There were tubes coming out of me everywhere, the catheter was an unexpected and unpleasant surprise I have to say :slight_smile:

I spent 5 days in the hospital while the good doctors and nurses brought me back to health. I missed out on the New Year celebrations, but hey, that was a small price to pay considering I nearly died just a few days before.

I’m just about recovered from my ordeal now, I’m sure many of you here have been through the same thing and I’m sorry for rambling on a bit, but this is the first opportunity I’ve had really to ‘talk’ about my experience, so I’m finding this a bit therapeutic in a way.

One small thing I want to ask you about. While in the hospital, I was also suffering with Oral Thrush, maybe caused by all the antibiotics I’d been on. Maybe because of that, or maybe because of the large quantity of fluids they had to replace intravenously, but from that day to this, my saliva has been like water, and everything tastes just…‘watery’, nothing tastes as good as it used to. I was just wondering if anyone else with DKA had experienced this afterwards, and whether their taste returned and how long it took? I don’t know if it’s the thrush or the DKA that caused it.

Sorry my post was so long but thanks for reading anyway, I’m glad to have found this place.

Chris

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Thrush is a yeast infection. Yeast thrives on sugar so it makes sense for a diabetic with out of control sugar to develop yeast infections of any type. And of course being on antibiotics also didn’t help the yeast infection. Last time I had thrush it took about a month for me to be able to “taste” food again.

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You totally just described my the day I was diagnosed, minus the catheter (THANK GOD!). I just had a complete memory rush!

Food wise I think it pretty much tasted like nothing during. Toward the end of my week in the hospital I found certain things I didn’t like before tasted good to me, but for the most part I was pretty out of it the first half of the week. Because I was so dehydrated with numbers off the charts. I was like you just a few days away from dying.

I felt like was shutting down, like one organ at a time (probably sounds weird), and it just took a while for everything to come back on line. Does that make sense? Don’t know if I added any value.

glad to hear you are feeling better though!

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Hi Chris good to have you here, can you tell me how long your blood sugars were high before the attack ? If you look at my posting you will see why i ask this. Did you miss your warning signs ? and if so was the start of your illness a bug that masked the signs.

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Thanks for all the replies already :slight_smile: Thanks Cody, it’s good to know that I’m not the only one who experienced loss of taste, and even better to know that it’s only temporary.

Thanks Leah, and sorry if I brought up any bad memories for you. I can’t say I experienced the ‘shutting down’ like you did, but yep, I was pretty much out of it by the time I arrived at the hospital,I was told that I was babbling incoherently, asking for jello (a word that we don’t even use in England…ha!) I remember trying to ask the ambulance driver which hospital we were going to, and it came out as “are we going to fairyland?”…tehehe!!..and I was even worse after they’d given me morphine! :slight_smile:

Thanks Bill, I have to think about this one for a minute. I didn’t recognize the warning signs to be honest. I knew about ketoacidosis, but I never imagined the symptoms to be so severe, I guess I always thought I’d just slip peacefully into a coma, how wrong could I be?

I was admitted to hospital on Tuesday 29th December. I started displaying the symptoms of DKA on the Monday, but I thought I’d simply come down with another virus on top of all the others I’d been having for over a month prior to that. I didn’t take any insulin at all on either the monday or the tuesday because my appetite was gone and I didn’t eat a thing on either of those days. I didn’t know that my sugar level would continue to rise even without eating. I’m a bit ashamed to say that after having this disease for nearly 9 years, I just didn’t know. So to answer your question, my sugar level was probably dangerously high for about 36 hours before I went to the hospital.

At least I now know the warning signs in case it happens again. I also wonder if it’s still possible to get ketoacidosis even when you see the signs and take every precaution to stop it from happening? Obviously I don’t want this to happen again.

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Hi Chris,
Please don’t feel badly about not knowing how bad DKA really is. We all “live and learn”. An Oral Surgeon told me that there are a number of things that can cause trouble with the taste buds in our mouths. And the first thing we should do is to stop all mouth washs. He said most of them have alcohol in them and make the problem worse. The best thing to do is to use a warm water and salt rinse two times each day, gently. That way we have no added chemicals, just the salt (not iodized) and the warm water. He told me that over time the immune system will get built back up and the vitamins we have lost will get replaced.and the taste buds should get repaired. You can help those things with your intake. Make it really healthy and don’t let sugars or acids build up in your mouth during the day. If you drink coffee or sodas or tea, rinse your mouth after each with just plain warm water. After brushing use the warm salt water. My own bit of advice is to make sure you try to keep your BG as in control as possible. I wish you well and no more DKA. Please be sure to come back and let us know how you are doing.

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Hi Chris, when my sons get a bug i have to go into overdrive and watch them very carefully. I look for changes in mood, dullness around the eyes. I know warning signs are different for different people and i had to learn the hard way.

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Hi Chris sorry to hear about your experience but Diabetes is an ongoing education. I went into DKA when I was a child which was a long time ago so I don’t remember how it was. You’ve come to the right place to help you with your education Diabetes is a lifetime of ongoing education.

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Chris,
I was diagnosed at the age of 23 (almost 3 years ago now) and my diagnosis was much like your run in with DKA. I had no idea I was diabetic. They (the doctors) say I ran out (RAN OUT - not started to lose it…completly ran out) of insulin sometime in late January of 2006. I wasn’t diagnosed until late April of 2006. My A1C was 16.8 when I was diagnosed…ICU for 4 days…the hospital for another week after that. I know that I’m lucky to be alive.

I had the same experience with taste. Nothing tasted quite the same. Meals that I would have loved I suddenly didn’t like. I blamed it on the stinky hospital food until they let me have Diet Coke. that tasted funny too. Even when I returned home after 11 days of hospital food, my mom’s cooking didn’t taste the same. I thought it was because I didn’t enjoy the food since I had to take shots along with it. I’m not sure when food started tasting “normal” again. I do, however, remember the first meal I actually enjoyed and it was a couple months after my diagnosis. Not sure if that helps. but I did experience a lot of what you did and understand. Glad you’re feeling better and that you’ve found TuDiabetes!

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Well, it hasn’t been a very good beginning to 2009 for me. For the second time this year I was taken by ambulance to the hospital with severe stomach pains. I awoke at 5.30am, doubled over with pain and feeling sick. My sugar level was 5.1 so that eased my fear of DKA again. I was given morphine in the ambulance for the pain, and my sugar level gradually rose to 17.4.

Despite several tests in the Emergency Unit, they couldn’t determine what was actually wrong. They hooked me up to some IV fluids, kept a close eye on my sugar level and blood pressure, and just left me there basically. The morphine slowly wore off (oh that’s good stuff that morphine :O) but the severe pain didn’t return, so it was all a bit of a mystery really. This evening I’m recuperating at my Sister’s house, and praying that it doesn’t return, whatever it was.

Thank you all once again for your kind comments

Chris :slight_smile:

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Sorry to hear about your latest illness hope you have a followup appointment so the doctors can find out what it is…keep in touch.

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Yes yes - my diet pepsi tasted weird and metalic.
I have had db for 35 years and had two episodes of dka. The first one, about 20 years ago came on suddenly. I was 7 miles from home on a bike ride and threw up in the gutter. I just thought it was a stomach virus. I was in the hospital for 5 nights and bounced back quickly.
The second, about 10 years ago, came on slowly. I was very depressed and didn’t care what was happening. I was in the icu for 2 nights and on a med surg floor for 3 more. This one took weeks for me to recover from. The doc said that dka is like “being forced to run a marathon with no training” I recall getting home and feeling like I wasn’t connected to my body - that I was floating above it.
I wish you well in the coming days - hopefully this won’t happen again, for either of us!