I recently started a series on diabetes, and I will continue here.
The aim is to bring some light regarding the very common disease and what to do when you face an emergency.
Oh...Yes. There are diabetic emergencies.
sometime last year...
or was it 2 years ago?
I can't really remember when it was exactly...
A respected friend told him how her father was found unconscious in the living room.
He was fine before that, talking and conversing as he would normally do, only that he was complaining of feeling tired, and since he barely get enough sleep the night before, everyone thought he should just go and sleep and he will be fine.
That's what everyone thought until he was found in the living room, unconscious and unresponsive to calls.
Here, in Nigeria, the very first thing that people do when they find an unconscious person is to pour water on the person...irrespective of the cause.
Maybe its, because we are in a temperate climate... i really do not understand how it became the first response to an unconscious person.
Anyways, as this friend narrated to me her father's ordeal, the fear in her voice was palpable, her face told a story of intense displeasure with the level of education of the average man on emergency response.
Well, they poured water on her father... tapped him, called him, did everything else but call a hospital.
The other bad thing here is that there is no 911 to call...
no effective ambulance system.
Source
Luckily, one of the people living around knew a little about medicine and suggested that his blood sugar be checked...
guess what?
his sugar was severely low...
by this time, with the shoutings and water on his face, her father was conscious but extremely drowsy...
they got a bottle of coke and helped him with it until he was able to gain his strength back.
She asked a question that still breaks my heart to this day...
What if nobody knew enough to actually check his sugar?
Her Dad was diabetic and had probably taken his medication without food...that's why his sugar was so low.
What if all the people around were just pouring water on him and calling him and doing all the traditional things we do when someone goes unconscious?
Her father would have been dead by now.
Personally, I have had people who I knew would be alive if only the emergency response was adequate.
That's why I am writing...
Well, someone might say,
If I wanted to know about diabetes, I could just ask google
Well, what if you don't get the chance to ask google before an emergency comes up?
what if that knowledge regarding diabetes gets required of you sooner than you expected?
before you finished sorting the 10,000 different information on google, life would have been lost... a complication would have set in.
I am starting with diabetes, but I will write on a lot of other common illnesses that plague humanity.
Did you know that the number of people with diabetes rose from 108 million in 1980 to 422 million in 2014? And that In 2019, diabetes was the ninth leading cause of death with an estimated 1.5 million deaths directly caused by diabetes.
In the world of medicine, we have come to a point where people should not die from diabetes, even though we don't have a permanent cure for it, it can be managed properly even for a lifetime.
This is why you should know something about it.
I agree, you don't have to know the different types of diabetes... it's for your doctor or healthcare provider to know, and I apologize for lacing you with it in my previous post...
But, here's a promise, I will write to provide relevant information henceforth.
Thanks for reading this far...
anticipate my next post, where I will explain misconceptions about diabetes Mellitus.
