Diabetic Whiplash



Our family, like most families affected by Diabetes, are forced to play a daily game that I like to call Diabetic Twister.

Here's how it goes...The person with diabetes walks into the room with normal blood sugar levels and everyone is standing firm. Thirty minutes later they come into the room feeling a little shaky so they check their blood sugar and are a little low. No problem, they drink a glass of juice to raise their blood sugar and follow it up with some peanut butter crackers to help keep the blood sugar up.

An hour later you check on the person with diabetes and they're drinking non-stop. A quick blood sugar check shows their blood sugar is a little high, so they take some insulin and you make a mental note to check again in an hour

An hour later you go to remind your diabetic loved one to check their blood sugar and you're greeted by somebody who looks like your person with diabetes, but their normally loving personality has been replaced by a person with a pissy mood who is holding their head over a puke bucket.  You tell them it's time to check their blood sugar and they tell you to get the hell out of their room...loudly.  Then the snarky comments start spewing from their mouth, each one like a poison arrow aimed straight for your heart.  At this point you know from experience their blood sugar is probably REALLY high, so beg, plead, cajole, and nag until they finally check. This normally includes some very animated slamming of things, mumbling, and all around bratty attitude, but you know it's not your person, it's the disease, so you dodge those poison word arrows and ignore the behavior.  Depending on the age of your diabetic sometimes you figure out the correction dose, sometimes they do...but either way it becomes a waiting game to see what their blood sugar is going to do next. Depending on how high their blood sugar levels are you start watching for signs of diabetic ketoacidosis or DKA as we commonly call it.

DKA is a nightmare for the diabetic parent. When the diabetic is in DKA they have high levels of a nasty little chemical called Ketones. Simply put, Ketones are like poison to a diabetic and if left untreated they can lead to death.  We take Ketones VERY seriously and keep a sharp lookout for the symptoms: extreme thirst, frequent urination, fruity smelling breath, agitation, irritation or aggression, confusion, sluggishness, fatigue, rapid breathing, rapid heart rate, and nausea.

Now THIS is where the fun begins!  In order to flush the body of the ketones you must do two things...drink LOTS of water and take much more insulin than normal. Of course that leads to the next problem...their blood sugar bottoming out. This means somebody needs to stay awake to check on the person with diabetes throughout the night because while high blood sugar will damage their body and can lead to loss of limbs, loss of vision, higher rates of heart disease and stroke, and several severe neuropathies that can damage everything from nerves in their fingers and legs to their internal organs, untreated low blood sugar leads to death. 

Here's a little known fact outside the diabetic community...More diabetics die from LOW blood sugar rather than high blood sugar. We call it the "dead in bed" syndrome and it's the thing we fear most.  Blood sugars drop while the diabetic is sleeping, but because they aren't awake they don't feel the symptoms and they aren't treated. Blood sugars continue to drop, the person goes into a seizure, or a coma, and then cardiac arrest.

Yep, we take low blood sugars VERY seriously.

So..back to Diabetic Twister. This is a non-ending event for diabetic families...and I call them (us) a diabetic family because diabetes truly does affect every member of the family.  Diabetic Twister often causes another complication I call Diabetic Whiplash.  They're low, they're high, they're higher, they're low again, they're wayyy too low, they're normal, no wait they're high again...FOR THE LOVE OF GOD WILL IT JUST STAY IN NORMAL RANGE SO I CAN HAVE MY (fill in the blank mother/father/sister/brother/daughter/son/grandchild) BACK!?!

Diabetic Whiplash often causes emotional fatigue.  A person with low or high blood sugar levels are often not very pleasant to be around. They say things...MEAN things..and this is often at a very loud volume punctuated by loud sighs, eye rolling animated body movements, and sometimes items being thrown at you.  Sometimes it even leads to a physical attack.  Although we caregivers understand it's the disease, NOT the person, causing all this nastiness it still hurts our feelings...a LOT.  So even when the blood sugar levels go back within normal range and our diabetic is acting like their old self again we are still hurting.

So how do we deal with this day after day? We're THANKFUL. We are thankful our loved one is still here to hurl insults, we're THANKFUL they're here for us to check on throughout the night, we're THANKFUL for the insulin that causes the roller coaster of blood sugar levels, because before insulin diabetes was a terminal illness for everyone who got it.

So we'll happily play Diabetic Twister and suffer diabetic whiplash forever because it means our diabetic loved one is still with us.