Neeeeed to Lighten Up.

Blog has been super serious lately. I need to lighten the mood. So here.

This is a cat in a sweater.

I'm Okay. Almost.

It's finally time for an update.

Monday morning around 3 am I woke up feeling nauseous and crampy. It was hard to move. I tested myself and my blood sugar was 567. I gave myself correction and went to bed. About 45 minutes later I woke up feeling exactly the same way, with exactly the same blood sugar. Pulled my pump site out and there was blood in the cannula.

A failed site.

I changed my site and tried more correction. I forced myself to throw up. Feeling a little better.

By this time Erik is awake.

I'm starting to get freaked out, honestly. I remember a story about a counselor from before my time at Camp Carefree. She was at college and caught a cold, and decided to take a nap. She never woke up, the ketones put her into a coma. This story was terrifying me, I was too afraid to go to sleep. I was literally afraid that I was on the verge of death. I'd never had ketones at this level before, and I'd never had such difficulty getting my blood sugar back down.

Though the second correction had done a tiny bit of good, I decided to take a shot of insulin instead. Erik and I stayed up watching some TV shows and waiting for my blood sugar to go down. By 5:30, I was around 300, and feeling much, much better. We decided to go to sleep.

We woke up around 9:00, and I tested at around 230. Figuring everything was over, I called my endocrinologist to let her know what happened and check in. She wanted me to test my ketones and get a definitive reading, so she sent a prescription for ketone strips to walmart. At 11:00, I retested back in the 300's, and my ketones were large.

I was headed to the ER.

I've never been hospitalized as a diabetic, save my diagnosis. I've had some pretty rough goes of it, but never anything I couldn't handle. And honestly, I was shocked, and a little relieved, that this came about from something that was out of my control. The site was barely 24 hours old, and had been working up until I went to bed. I was spared hours and hours of lecturing, everyone involved assuming that I was a good diabetic and that these things just happen. It almost seemed wrong.

The good news was that, despite my fears, I had never gone in to DKA. The ketone levels were bad, but not so bad that I was ever in any real danger. I was given two liters of fluids, and a shot of insulin to get my levels back down.

Erik and I left the hospital around 6:00pm. We headed back to the residence hall so I could register for classes and get some stuff together, then booked it over to Moe's Burritos to eat for the first time that day. I stayed at his place the next two nights. Sleeping alone was a little too scary, yet.

It's been a week, and I'm honestly still shaken by this.