My most recent bad hypo involved having to starve overnight before surgery then accidentally overdoing my short acting insulin, which resulted in a hypo just as I was being prepped for surgery. Because I have no visible hypo symptoms I seemed perfectly OK despite a very low BG reading, so the nurse and anaesthetist were more concerned with trying to work out how and when I had taken too much insulin and whether I’d followed their protocol, rather than offering me a glucose drip to correct the hypo. Then the surgical team arrived to discuss important details of the surgery with me and although I managed to say “I am not in a fit state to think about this right now”, they were clearly completely ignorant about what the effects of hypoglycaemia are on both body and brain and how dangerous it is. They even gave me consent forms to sign while I was begging them to give me glucose quickly, so I scrawled a signature on the papers presented to me without understanding anything they had told me. As my surgery at least was delayed until I’d been treated and had recovered to within normal BG range, I had to ask all of the questions I needed answers to only when I was actually lying on the operating table. My signature on the consent forms was actually invalid as it was obtained while I was incapacitated, but because of the invisible nature of my hypo state, even Drs who knew my BG reading assumed I was normal and competent.
Since losing hypo warning symptoms I’ve had many hypos in public places, and almost always am assumed to be mad, drunk, drugged or all three. Somehow, before I lost my warning symptoms I don’t recall having a single bad hypo at all. Tingling fingers always alerted me in good time to treat the hypo before it progressed. When they did start happening without warning it took me a long while to figure out what was going on. My first attacks happened at work (on Film and TV shoots abroad), and as a result I could no longer drive company vehicles and was no longer able to do my job as an Art Director.
So I resigned and went travelling and had a bad hypo on a bus traveling from Bulgaria to Greece. We had stopped at the one and only café along the route and every single item sold was loaded with honey or sugar so I bought nothing (I’m quite fanatical about only eating whole foods and resent being forced to eat refined junk food). Sometime later I came to lying on the front seats with all eyes on me, being looked after by a Greek passenger who spoke broken English and told me he had a son with Diabetes living in Canada, so he knew what to do and had read my medic alert bangle, and presumably he’d given me some form of sugar. I was very embarrassed at holding up the entire busload of locals and behaving like a crazy foreigner, but my embarrassment became even more of an issue by the time we reached our final destination in Greece. At embarkation all passengers’ passports had been handed to the driver and were piled up on the dashboard in large piles of Bulgarian and Greek, with only one British passport (mine) and one Belgian passport which belonged to a skinny guy who was drinking litres of coke and increasingly frequently along the journey asking the bus driver in English to stop so he could have a ****. The rest of the passengers became more and more upset about this and after laughing and jeering at him, by the time we approached our destination in built up city streets, they started shouting at him in Greek or Bulgarian and seemed to be berating the driver for stopping again. The guy was clearly absolutely desperate and could not wait even 5 minutes so had to beg the driver to stop on a very busy main street just outside the bus station so he could **** against the bus wheels. I felt acutely sorry for him and spent much of the journey deliberating over how to tell him that he probably had Type I diabetes and needed to see a doctor.
I knew he was far from home because he had a Belgian passport and accent and his symptoms were exactly the same as mine before diagnosis, so I was convinced he was developing Type 1. Nevertheless I was so afraid that having caused a scene by having a public hypo in front of him on the bus, a suggestion that he had the same condition as me would be a horrific introduction to Diabetes for him. I know that my biggest fear on diagnosis was that I would be a public embarrassment due to hypos (apart from fear of the complications due to hyperglycemia) but before losing my warning symptoms hadn’t actually experienced that feared problem for 15 years of being diabetic, so in the end I decided that the diagnosis couldn’t come from me. I said nothing when we got off the bus, and have worried about him ever since.
A few days later on a sizzling hot day, while trying to catch buses and taxis up a steep hill to where I was staying I had another hypo. I did very foolish things on buses again, trying to put coins in slots not meant for coins and brandishing maps in front of drivers until they stopped to get rid of me. I had no idea where I was so hailed a taxi and then refused to get out of the taxi or pay when he arrived at my destination because I didn’t recognise it and became paranoid about where the driver was taking me. He called the police who came and arrested me and took me back down the hill to the police station where they examined my arms for needle tracks after finding insulin syringes on me. I could only tell the police that I didn’t know where the taxi driver was taking me. Luckily at some point in their interrogation I found a sandwich I had in my backpack and ate it in the police station, but at no point was I aware that I’d been hypo. I was dropped back at the bottom of the hill, sopping wet with sweat and with no money for another taxi, so had to trek up the hill again. When I got back to the B&B at the top of the escarpment, my host introduced me to two English girls who’d just arrived and said I must talk to them because we had a lot in common. I thought I had diabetes on the brain when I noticed one of them pulling out a little black kit bag and doing a blood test.
Back in England the adventures continued. I went to register with a new GP in London and was sitting in front of him explaining that I seemed to have hypo attacks with no warning symptom at all and while explaining this became hypo. He said to me” You’re confused, go away and come back when you’re not confused”. I staggered off to the tube station, lost my wallet and tube pass and collapsed on a platform. This was a very dangerous place for me to be as I had no control of my body and could so easily fall under a train. I lay on the ground fitting and sweating for an unknown time and when I came round, station staff accused me of making the story up when I asked for help because I couldn’t find my ticket or my wallet and credit cards when I tried to exit the station.
On one occasion some years later I had just bought a classic Saab car and for the first time had had to park my prized possession in the hospital’s car park while going for an X-ray or some non-diabetic related appointment. The waiting time took much longer than I expected and I apparently became hypo and lost consciousness. I woke up on a trolley being wheeled to A&E with the porters/nurses talking about me. They were trying to wake me or keep me conscious by talking and were asking my name, my address, what year it was etc. I was fully aware of what they were saying but was still in early recovery and actually hadn’t yet recovered the physical coordination necessary to speak, so was lying there listening to them and thinking how ridiculous it was to pressure me to waste precious energy/glucose on talking when my BG was clearly still too low. I didn’t know how long I might have been unconscious for so started worrying about my precious new car overstaying the parking voucher I’d left on its windscreen. When I didn’t reply I heard one of them say “She’s probably homeless” and was shocked and horrified that they would assume this. As soon as I could manage it I blurted out something about my posh car waiting in the car park and getting a fine, but they didn’t take that very seriously. I can only assume that my camouflage pattern clothing was sodden with sweat, and they thought this carefully chosen image was urine stained hobo style!
Since then some of the more frustrating ‘unmemorable’ incidents have been flying to Amsterdam for one night in order to see a sold out art exhibition but getting no further than the museum café where Dutch permissiveness allows security staff to discreetly ignore those who stagger around and lie down instead of looking appreciatively at the artworks. A similar occasion was a London lecture by a world famous neuroscientist to which I gained entry by offering to help with admissions. A hypo put paid to any help from me and though I was still permitted to sit in during the lecture, I sweated and fitted my way through and heard and saw nothing, while those on either side of me were far too polite to ask if anything was wrong.
I’ve now had so many public humiliations that I prefer as many people as possible to know that I’m diabetic and that I do have hypos, rather than suffer the indignity of being suspected of being mad and bad whenever I’m hypo, but sadly it has proved to be almost impossible to convey to non-diabetics including friends, family and Doctors, what exactly a hypo is.
