Over the weekend, I learned what diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA) is for the first time in my and it was scary.
My husband is Type 1 diabetic and on Saturday, we were at our friends home for and all the sudden he started to feel ill. Said he wasn’t feeling well and so we went home.
I asked him to test his BS which was a bit high. He vomited a few times and then napped on and off; something want quite right. He missed breakfast and couldn’t stomach lunch.
I went out to run errands and when I got back it started to get worse. We both chalked it up as a stomach bug.
I made some soup for dinner and he couldn’t take much. He seemed confused. We checked his BS again, this time it was 29 mmol! I got so scared I insisted on taking to him then local A&E. he was like it’s okay but I insisted. Thank god I did.
The nurse did a preliminary assessment all the sudden yelled “we have a DKA”. I didn’t know what it was but I knew it was serious based on how they rushed him into a room. The rest was a blur. I could see them working on him, which is really terrifying as I didn’t know what was going. I could see a nurse squeezing the last bits of fluid from the IV bag. After a while a doctor told me what happened and said that my husband was “extremely” ill as that they needed to take him to intensive care.
He is stable now but I feel really guilty. I should have taken it more seriously instead of thing it’s just a stomach bug. I didn’t know even what it was. I asked the doctor and she said one of the telltale signs was a fruity, sweet door on a persons breath. She said that, confusion and nausea/vomiting are all things to look for. It was right there in front of me.
I have been doing a lot of reading on the internet and this thing is really scary.
Would love to hear about your experience with it.