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Diabetes

Diabetes Mellitus

Alexander Wallbrett
October 20, 2006
Wallbrett 2
It had not been fifteen minutes since I started my shift and already my pager was going crazy. The pager simply read: 56 year-old male, Altered LOC. The possibilities of what we might encounter began running through my mind. Had he been using drugs or was it a medical condition? My mind could not stop even as we arrived on scene. It was not until I saw the patient that I was able to rule out some of my prior assumptions. The patient was exhibiting many signs of distress: his respirations were at 32 shallow and ineffective, his skins were pale, moist and diaphoretic. His pulse was 120 bpm and his blood pressure was 90/50. He was only oriented x1, to his person. There were no family members at home and with so little knowledge of his past medical history, I had to slowly piece together possible causes of the problem and solutions of what could be done to help him. The patient's orientation made it difficult for him to volunteer much information but as he attempted to answer my questions, he mumbled that he had been vomiting for two days and that he had taken insulin this morning. This was an instant trigger for me that the man might be experiencing a diabetic problem, most likely insulin shock. This happens when a person takes insulin to control the amount of glucose (sugar) that enters their cells and for some reason is unable to keep their body's glucose at a minimum level. For example, the patient had been vomiting and was not able to keep food in his system, so there is a large build up of insulin that takes glucose from wherever it can, causing the body to break down all of its stored fat in order to compensate for the absence of glucose. There is a very limited amount of sugar in the body so after a couple of hours without food, one's body runs out of glucose and start's to go into insulin shock. Right away I placed the patient on high flow O2, 15L via NRB, established an IV,...