Miffli, the down side of facilitating a diabetes group is hearing hospital stories like yours, though they're not usually that scary...yikes! And it's stories like yours that keep me so motivated to keep my diabetes well controlled.
If you look at the glucose levels I posted here today, you'll see that they ran high for a while too, but that was with no fruit, no berries, no sugar, no sweeteners. Meat, cheese, butter, eggs, raw nuts, non-starchy veggies, and leafy greens, avocados, green olives, and a variety of fats and oils only. The sweetest thing I ate was a quarter of a carrot on my salad for lunch in the early days of the my keto diet.
Four years earlier I'd come off all wheat, rye, and barley after being diagnosed with non-celiac gluten sensitivity (and I loved baking!). After two weeks of withdrawal symptoms, I called the facilitator of the local gluten-free group and she hooked me up with gluten-free baker. Once a week I could get freshly baked, gluten-free bread, rolls, cakes, and cookies again. And the withdrawal symptoms stopped. It probably was partly from coming off the grains, but more probably in larger part due to coming off the sugar.
When I started the keto diet, I went through withdrawal from sugar all over again, but this time I knew I could push through it if I just stuck it out for two to three weeks. That said, I'm not perfect. What I finally settled on was a box of frozen, gluten-free, peanut butter cookies that came 9 to a box. When the cravings became so bad for something, anything that tasted sweet, I'd get one of those cookies out of the freezer and eat it frozen. By the end of the nine weeks, I'd purchased a total of two boxes of those cookies and still had a few cookies left, which I finally threw in the trash months later uneaten.
I had other ways of countering the intense cravings for "sweet": garlic dill pickles, by themselves, or rolled up with a slice of ham, and a slice of cheese or a chunk of cream cheese. Delicious. Journalist Nina Teicholz, author of the ground breaking book, The Big Fat Surprise (2014), still has cravings for sweet sometimes. To counter it, she eats some fat instead. And that works for her. I've done that with a pat of butter for years.
You don't know how good real food tastes until you've completely given up "sweet" for a period of time. I don't know how else to explain it. It's something that you have to experience to understand.
You're doing a lot right with your diet. It's a big change, I know, but it's so worth it in the long run.