Having been hospitalised twice with DKA you do not sound as though that is what you have. When you get seriously ill, as with Flu or Gastro, your liver will stop processing the insulin so your sugars go up and are not reduced by the insulin. Your body will then try other ways to get rid of the sugar through vomiting and diarrhea. Speaking only for myself when I have had an illness I took only enough bolus to cover the carbohydrates I was eating( not many!) and the basal, lots of fluids and rest. Could it be a UTI, they can be vicious and need antibiotics?
That absolutely could be COVID. Delta can present primarily with diarrhea. I donāt know how likely that isācould be many other viruses too. Doesnāt sound like DKA at all to me, which doesnāt tend to cause diarrhea so much as sometimes be caused when a person with T1 has such bad vomitting/diarrhea that they stop eating and also stop taking much insulin, and then go insulin deficient, but that comes with a whole host of distinct symptoms you arenāt reporting.
Thanks everyone for al the help/advice.
I think at this point we can clearly say it wasnāt DKA.
Yesterday when I woke up I felt 80% better and had no diahrea at all the entire day, so like a stupid idiot that I am sometimes I scheduled my wife and Iās COVID19 booster (Moderna) and flu shot at the same time in the middle of the afternoon after church. After taking a nap, I also did some OT working from home 5-8:30 so that I could sit quietly (I"m a remote AAA dispatcher for the time being. Eventually we will be all called back into the office, but thatās TBD when).
Now today I feel like I got a cold, which is to be expected I guess, but my wife now has the diahrea. So it must be a stomach bug. She barely has type 2 and definitely not type 1. Sheās only on Ozempic, which has done wonders to curb her apetite btw, and thatās it. Her last A1C was in the 6ās. I mainly have a stuffy head, runny nose, tired, sore arms a bit at the injection site, and light sensitivity.
The reason we got the COVID19 boosters is that we are traveling from St. Louis, MO to Kalamazoo, MI over thanksgiving via Amtrak, and I hear they are not doing so well with COVID19 outbreaks. We also are going to be visiting my parents in Chicago over Christmas and they are ultra careful with all the medical conditions they have and canāt get covid19. If my dad got it, heād be in the hospital for sure. They both got Pfiser and got their boosters too.
Sorry for all of my ramblings and hope I didnāt type too much info. Thanks for reading this long personal post.
If you or anyone has what seems like viral diarrhea, you really really should be tested for COVID. Again, itās entirely possible with Delta for COVID to show up with just that as a symptom, and important to know as to not transmit to others.
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Iāve rarely gotten through any kind of stomach bug without IV fluids since I became diabetic. It just becomes very hard to bring things under control even without DKA. A saline drip, in my experience, can do wonders.
I donāt think itās wise to tough it out, even though ERs are definitely no fun.
100% agree with that, too.
Dehydration? I have two words: Gator Aid.
Everyone is different but if you can rehydrate orally, youāre better off. And often youāll need more insulin than the carbs would suggest.
Thatās what we did except we had MIO Energy on hand so used those drops. Doing much better. Right now all our hosptal ERs are filled with sick people, so to go there just for fluids would have taken forever just to get seen and lots of germs we donāt need.
Anyone know if places like TOTAL ACCESS or CVS Take Care can do IV fluids or is that just ERs that can?
I know that many of the strip-mall urgent care places can do typical blood panels (including ketones, electrolytes, glucose, etc) on-site with a venous blood draw in just minutes. Which can be good for diagnosis. But Iāve never seen them doing IVs for critical DKA stabilization or IV insulin.
DKA stabilization in my experience is at least a couple days in a real hospital bed with potassium and insulin drips and stat blood tests every few hours, round the clock.
Yea DKA is no joke and you need some real hospital monitoring.
The older we get the harder it is to recover from it.
Iām lucky I can recognize the feeling from it starting to happen,but with CGM I havenāt had issues in many years.
Back in the day if my set pulled out and I didnāt know, I could move into DKA in under an hour.
People on MDI are at lower risk because there is usually some long acting insulin circulating at any given point.
Thanks everyone for all of your help!
I asked once if my endo wanted me to cary a glucogon (?sp) pen and he said no. I asked him why, and he said because my CGM never showed me low enough long enough to need it! Unsure if I should be concerned or ask for one anyway?
Also, on those ketostyx (?sp) how long do they last? The box I got was two vials of 50. Seems like it could take me years to use those up!
Yes, many of us have have only ever used one or zero strips from a can of 50 ketostix. The strips themselves are quite sensitive to humidity.
Similarly many of us have had countless glucagon kits that just expired without ever being used. I myself have had a couple ER trips/911 calls for being unconscious from extremely low blood sugar, and I am under the impression that If youāre in an area that has fairly rapid ambulance response, your family can call 911, and the EMTās will arrive and know how to fingerstick-check you and administer glucagon they carry with them. In an ER they may put you straight on a glucose or dextrose drip (not sure the decision tree that decides whether you get glucagon or IV glucose).
In California (I donāt know about other states) the EMTās and Paramedics do not carry glucagon and are not authorized to use it even if you have it on you (they can AFAIK instruct a family member on how to use it). They can orally administer glucose/any kind of fast acting sugar or place an IV and put you on a dextrose drip.
They more likely will push dextrose. I had that done when I was younger. Paramedic pushed 50 Ml of dextrose and I woke right up.
Glucagon takes too long to act.
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