DKA

Something we noticed in the hospital discharge instructions: there was another factor we thought was a symptom, but might have caused, or at least exacerbated, everything. She was in Diabetic Keto Acidosis (DKA). The hospital lab said her blood glucose (BG) was around 900 when she was admitted. It had been off scale high since the previous day. We'd been trying to get it down by injecting her with unusually large amounts of Humulog, a powerful short-acting insulin, but with apparently little success, since the number hadn't gotten down enough to register on her little meter, which only reads as high as 600. Symptoms of DKA include most of what she was experiencing, except for the fluid they saw on the lungs in the X-Ray and the CAT scan. We couldn't figure out how her BG got so high in the first place, and had to assume her body was stressed, which we know will drive BG up.