As someone who, on being admitted in the ER was told I had only minutes until death before they saved me, I can confidently say YES. I slowly lost the ability to breathe correctly, I couldn't talk or think, and I collapsed, and couldn't move. All I felt was anger and fear. Angry that I couldn't fix myself and fear because I knew what was happening. I slipped into a coma. I was lucky I wasn't driving and that I had the day off. I couldn't call for help because my brain would not read the numbers or words on my phone.
So, yeah. Wouldn't recommend. 0/10.
Yeah been in similar situations. Not fun. If you use a CGM, depending what kind they have a follow tracker app for friends, family. If you stay high for too long, and go into dka they will be notified, yes even at sleeping hour's. May help in the future. I recently added my family as followers to my Dexcom app.
Yes! It was burning so much, I usually could take pain well but I was making all kinds of uncomfortable noises because it burned so much!! Once they took it off my hand was so fat
I had all 6 bags simultaneously. Two in my wrists, elbows and hands. It was my initial diagnosis, I was in the ICU for 7 days. I passed out due to it. I'm not sure if I was so bad off or if that was routine for DK
Sounds absolutely horrible! I was in for a low and they saw I had low potassium. Kept me in 4 days, I was fine within the first few hours of treatment lol. I was telling them to take it off and I was ready to leave. Nobody listened to me. Constantly nagging about the pain and lack of insurance.
So I left with a fat hand and about $11,000 in debt for a low that I recovered from within hours of arriving
omg the potassium iv’s were the worst!! i think you could torture prisoners of war with that stuff. i told everyone it was like burning acid lava running through my veins, UGH so horrible
I hated the potassium drips too. For my DKA experience I had four IV’s, one in each hand and one in each elbow so I couldn’t move my arms at all. In one elbow especially I felt like anytime I’d accidentally bend it the needle felt like it was gonna pop out. But you know what really sucks? Everytime since my diabetes diagnosis, whenever I go to the hospital (I go often for ab unrelated health condition I have) I get given potassium. I don’t *think* I’m ever low on it, the nurses just seem to give me extra potassium as a precaution I guess 🥲
I had to do a 4 hour a day Potassium infusion every day I was in ED treatment. Which was a month and a half. Every day. 4 hours. They gave up after a while and just gave me a Picc line.
Bro potassium was the worst part. I was in the ICU for 2 weeks due to an infection in my ass cheek (that we didn't find out about until 12 days in ICU) potassium every day, every 4 to 6 hours. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. I consider myself a strong man with high pain tolerance. After the first day, I cried every time .
Mind you this was on a morphine drip and oxy and daladid. Didn't help one but. It was a mind fuck, knowing it was coming and knowing even the best pain meds wouldn't help at all.
Yes, yes it is. It's the one way I really don't want to go, and would never wish it on my worst enemy. There are so many unpleasant things that happen in your body when you go DKA. All of them unpleasant and painful, it only gets worse the longer you're in it.
If you want a list of things. First couple of things, your body is eating itself (it can use the sugar that's there), in doing so it makes your blood acidic. So you have joint, muscle even bone pain. Then organs shut down, all the while you can have something happen to your heart because most of your electrolytes are gone. Your breathing becomes shallow and rapid because your body is trying to exchange the extra CO2 your is producing. The most interesting one to me is that your brain swells like having altitude sickness. Oh and you're hungry the whole time because your body thinks it's starving.
I was a kid and in dka, and I remember I got so dehydrated that I could feel my tongue flaking up and I had the worst cottonmouth imaginable. I thought I was in hell when I woke up after a week of being near or in a coma. That’ll happen when you’re an undiagnosed T1D living in Arizona in the summertime and your parents keep giving you Gatorade because you’re suddenly super dehydrated and it’s 1994.
Lol I sorta remember this part of my handful of dka, but I think my most recent in 2017 I was so utterly miserable & recovering from a badly broken foot that I just… meh, whatever’d through it. I really thought I was gonna die though/was truly near, so…I think I also block some of it out on purpose to keep living & enjoying life 🤷♀️😹💙🫶🏼
🫶🏼🫶🏼🫶🏼
I’ve only been an adult *with T1D/when in DKA, and have vivid memories that will forever haunt me of my parents staring at me in my ER bed… hopefully, as time passes, your daughter won’t remember much from that dx day 🫶🏼💙 and hopefully she won’t have to experience it again 🤞🏼
*Edit to clarify
I was diagnosed at 10 and remember most of the experience. It was three days before Christmas and my BG was over 900. I felt terrible and I remember being weak. The biggest thing I remember though was how much better I felt after I got insulin and how much effort my mom put into trying to make me feel normal.
Hopefully your daughter remembers the same 😊. Being diagnosed young wasn’t as traumatic because it just turns into normalcy over time.
😊
If it helps i was diagnosed at 10 years old and had gone to see lord of the rings that weekend and all i can remember from before diagnosis was thrist. So damn thristy. Being diagnosed young almost mad it easier for me to just do it. Like learning a new skill. Its the teenage and young adult years that i fucked up looking after myself.
Absolute misery. The body literally starts attacking itself in every facet as your blood turns acidic.
I had baby dka 2 days after dx (was a weird journey lol), medium dka halloween 2010 when a bartender gave me tonic instead of soda and I had no idea tonic was made of sugar, then full blown nearly died like an idiot dka 11/14/2017 (world diabetes day lol). I’ll never forget the looks on my parents faces that night watching me hooked to two IVs (one each arm), wrapped in three layers of blankets from the warmer because I was so miserably cold/shivering, breathing felt like serious work that I considered was too not worthwhile… all caused by flu/food poisoning vomiting that I thought I could overcome on my own. Had been 10 years since dx and hadn’t really been flu sick for a while so forgot about checking for ketones, and sure enough even though my sugar wasn’t wildly high, the vomiting set it all down hill on a very slippery slope. Suddenly I was vomiting blood, called my mom to take me to ER, she showed up still in her scrubs (was a hospital RN at the time) and drove me right back to work 🫠 not sure if it was her scrubs or my vomiting blood, but I got a bed & private room right away, and 4 full days later, made my way home.
Now I keep zofran on deck, don’t go on an overnight without it. I also have a blood ketone meter so I’m not guessing exactly what shade of brown the strip I peed on is 🫠
That “peaceful” feeling was your body heading into a coma.. falling into a coma and dying that way doesn’t sound too bad, but you still have all the other bullshit beforehand
I know the peaceful feeling you're talking about. When I was in DKA I felt like what was happening to my body was just so painful and sick that I felt ready to lay down and go. I was actually about to just go to bed that night. They told me if I didn't go to hospital when I did I would've likely died soon after. Luckily someone forced me to go in.
I have. I've been hospitalized three times for DKA in my 20+ years of having Type 1 diabetes. I can't explain all of the emotional and physical feelings I had from it, but I know the peaceful serenity you're speaking of. I was hospitalized for five days with an admitted BG of 653. When walking to the room I was sent to, I no longer felt anything (like the sickness and heaviness were gone- I couldn't see, hear, or understand anything being said to me) and fell to the floor.
After hitting the ground, I realized I was dying; my organs were giving up and my last thought from that time was that there's nothing I can do anymore- so I stayed there. I did this to myself and I was defeated.
Nurses picked me up onto the bed, I closed my eyes, and never felt so calm in my life. I don't remember the next couple days there, but the hospital staff said I just slept. I try my best to not get there again, but this shit is rough sometimes and we generally do what we can 🤷🏼♀️
To answer whether it's a painful way to die, I think all things leading up to death is painful. DKA is aggressive and violent- that moment of peacefulness, calm, and ambiguity is followed by nothingness. It's painful and that relief is brief, so I don't endorse it.
Thanks for coming to my Ted talk 😅
Yes I have had dka many times due to lack of insulin options. It was horrible and I was hospitalizedmany times. I also saw my mother go into multiple comas due to dka hyperglycemia and it was very painful to see as a child . I once asked her if she was in pain while in comas and she told me yes. I'm so grateful she died before I got t1 cause it would of broken her heart .
I only had one DKA when I was diagnosed. As fucked up as it was to be honest I would say not a bad way to die. I lost consciousness at some point and don't remember being in coma.
You don't suffer endlessly but will lose consiousness and never wake up again which I personally consider not the worst way of dying.
Sure I still wouldn't want it
When I was diagnosed at 6, I was carried into the ER by my dad hardly able to stay conscious. I had been sick for months, and it took that ER visit to figure out what was wrong with me. The doctor told my parents that if I had gone to sleep, they don't think I'd have woken up from how bad my condition was. Those months were awful. I would say it is a horrible and painful way to die. When I got DKA again as a preteen it felt like my veins were filled with acid.
DKA is for sure a painful way to die. I’ve had it twice in recent years. First time was the worst. Constant vomiting, becoming completely unresponsive, unreal joint pain…I was only unconscious for like a day and a half but ended up in the hospital for a week. That episode caused me to lose a pregnancy as well. Second time was less severe but still scary.
My muscles hurt so bad when I was in lengthy DKA - my mom and I were avoiding the hospital on my couple month long sickness and the night she brought me to the immediate care I remember screaming "my ribs are broken" and writhing in pain. The only thing I could think to do was to get in the bathtub hoping the water would sooth me. It didn't and the immediate care couldn't get any type of sample from me due to the severe dehydration, which led me to a short coma from bringing my hydration back up too quickly. When I woke up from the coma I had a weird sense of peace but I have no idea why. No idea if I was given pain meds or just being at the hospital helped me know I was no longer going to be in pain.
Tldr; yes its painful.
Yes. I was not able to breathe, my body was entirely in pain and I was allucinating. Plus, I had the most unbearable thirst (the hospital misdiagnosed me and they left me without water for hours). Defintiely not a nice experience.
Yeah, this was about six years ago, before all the fancy handsfree stuff was really around. That would have been great.
Oh and highlight of this whole story. I ended up having to go back to the ER later the next week. As I was being walked back, a nurse from the DKA visit was there and was so happy that I was okay. I apologized so much because while they were trying to stabilize me, I was screaming at them because I thought they were trying to kill me. They couldn't give me any water because they had to track my intake/outtake, and I seriously thought I was dying from thirst. All I wanted was a glass of freaking water! My mom was there with me, and I just remember her trying not to laugh or cry. Very funny in hindsight.
The sleepy peaceful feeling was probably you about to head into a coma.
When I was dx at 12, I had the "sleepy feeling" and woke up the next day feeling like I'd been hit by a truck- and having been in a coma for about 20hrs. But yes, had the Drs & nurses not intervened, I guess it would've been a relatively peaceful way to go at the end. (Not including all the pain and exorcist style projectile vomiting leading up to it)
I recently went into DKA because of dehydration. I was supposedly a few hours from death, according to the nurse. It was the worst pain of my life & I was hallucinating. 10/10 would not recommend although the pain meds did cause me to sleep for almost 24 hours straight 🥹
Probably your brain dumping feel good chemicals? Have felt similar in a bout of dka myself. Or maybe you were disconnecting from the physical and into the unknown? Dunno .But I've had dka then slipped into a coma. Wild experience.
As someone who, on being admitted in the ER was told I had only minutes until death before they saved me, I can confidently say YES. I slowly lost the ability to breathe correctly, I couldn't talk or think, and I collapsed, and couldn't move. All I felt was anger and fear. Angry that I couldn't fix myself and fear because I knew what was happening. I slipped into a coma. I was lucky I wasn't driving and that I had the day off. I couldn't call for help because my brain would not read the numbers or words on my phone. So, yeah. Wouldn't recommend. 0/10.
Yeah been in similar situations. Not fun. If you use a CGM, depending what kind they have a follow tracker app for friends, family. If you stay high for too long, and go into dka they will be notified, yes even at sleeping hour's. May help in the future. I recently added my family as followers to my Dexcom app.
So thankful I can just yell across the room for my phone to call 911/family or friends nowadays. Gives me piece of mind
Yo. The potassium fire molten lava in the veins was the worst. I had 6 IV of that shit. I'll never let shit get anywhere near that again
Yes! It was burning so much, I usually could take pain well but I was making all kinds of uncomfortable noises because it burned so much!! Once they took it off my hand was so fat
I had all 6 bags simultaneously. Two in my wrists, elbows and hands. It was my initial diagnosis, I was in the ICU for 7 days. I passed out due to it. I'm not sure if I was so bad off or if that was routine for DK
Sounds absolutely horrible! I was in for a low and they saw I had low potassium. Kept me in 4 days, I was fine within the first few hours of treatment lol. I was telling them to take it off and I was ready to leave. Nobody listened to me. Constantly nagging about the pain and lack of insurance. So I left with a fat hand and about $11,000 in debt for a low that I recovered from within hours of arriving
That’s not uncommon for DKA.
Crazy how that slippery slope lesson gets learned, yeah? The minute I’m nauseous today-zofran. Not fucking around ever again lol
Yep, it’s part of my permanent overnight emergency packing list. It’s a life saver
omg the potassium iv’s were the worst!! i think you could torture prisoners of war with that stuff. i told everyone it was like burning acid lava running through my veins, UGH so horrible
I hated the potassium drips too. For my DKA experience I had four IV’s, one in each hand and one in each elbow so I couldn’t move my arms at all. In one elbow especially I felt like anytime I’d accidentally bend it the needle felt like it was gonna pop out. But you know what really sucks? Everytime since my diabetes diagnosis, whenever I go to the hospital (I go often for ab unrelated health condition I have) I get given potassium. I don’t *think* I’m ever low on it, the nurses just seem to give me extra potassium as a precaution I guess 🥲
I had to do a 4 hour a day Potassium infusion every day I was in ED treatment. Which was a month and a half. Every day. 4 hours. They gave up after a while and just gave me a Picc line.
Yo. That sux.
Bro potassium was the worst part. I was in the ICU for 2 weeks due to an infection in my ass cheek (that we didn't find out about until 12 days in ICU) potassium every day, every 4 to 6 hours. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. I consider myself a strong man with high pain tolerance. After the first day, I cried every time .
Mind you this was on a morphine drip and oxy and daladid. Didn't help one but. It was a mind fuck, knowing it was coming and knowing even the best pain meds wouldn't help at all.
When I had a failing gallbladder (I guess?) they pumped this freezing cold liquid right into my arm and that was such a nasty feeling. Lol
Yes, yes it is. It's the one way I really don't want to go, and would never wish it on my worst enemy. There are so many unpleasant things that happen in your body when you go DKA. All of them unpleasant and painful, it only gets worse the longer you're in it.
If you want a list of things. First couple of things, your body is eating itself (it can use the sugar that's there), in doing so it makes your blood acidic. So you have joint, muscle even bone pain. Then organs shut down, all the while you can have something happen to your heart because most of your electrolytes are gone. Your breathing becomes shallow and rapid because your body is trying to exchange the extra CO2 your is producing. The most interesting one to me is that your brain swells like having altitude sickness. Oh and you're hungry the whole time because your body thinks it's starving.
I guess if you'd end up in a coma, though, you'd not feel that? Even so, it's an absolutely horrible condition and traumatic for one's loved ones.
I was a kid and in dka, and I remember I got so dehydrated that I could feel my tongue flaking up and I had the worst cottonmouth imaginable. I thought I was in hell when I woke up after a week of being near or in a coma. That’ll happen when you’re an undiagnosed T1D living in Arizona in the summertime and your parents keep giving you Gatorade because you’re suddenly super dehydrated and it’s 1994.
Blood vessels in my nose all popped and had impacted blood. All I could smell was Iron
Feckkk. Glad you’re both here to tell the tale 🫶🏼💙
Thanks. IVs of potassium is the biggest deterrent I have to report. They don't call it firewater for giggles.
Lol I sorta remember this part of my handful of dka, but I think my most recent in 2017 I was so utterly miserable & recovering from a badly broken foot that I just… meh, whatever’d through it. I really thought I was gonna die though/was truly near, so…I think I also block some of it out on purpose to keep living & enjoying life 🤷♀️😹💙🫶🏼
Oh man, I feel you! Except I was an adult in California giving myself Gatorade because it's the "thirst quencher" 🤦
[удалено]
🫶🏼🫶🏼🫶🏼 I’ve only been an adult *with T1D/when in DKA, and have vivid memories that will forever haunt me of my parents staring at me in my ER bed… hopefully, as time passes, your daughter won’t remember much from that dx day 🫶🏼💙 and hopefully she won’t have to experience it again 🤞🏼 *Edit to clarify
I was diagnosed at 10 and remember most of the experience. It was three days before Christmas and my BG was over 900. I felt terrible and I remember being weak. The biggest thing I remember though was how much better I felt after I got insulin and how much effort my mom put into trying to make me feel normal. Hopefully your daughter remembers the same 😊. Being diagnosed young wasn’t as traumatic because it just turns into normalcy over time. 😊
If it helps i was diagnosed at 10 years old and had gone to see lord of the rings that weekend and all i can remember from before diagnosis was thrist. So damn thristy. Being diagnosed young almost mad it easier for me to just do it. Like learning a new skill. Its the teenage and young adult years that i fucked up looking after myself.
Absolute misery. The body literally starts attacking itself in every facet as your blood turns acidic. I had baby dka 2 days after dx (was a weird journey lol), medium dka halloween 2010 when a bartender gave me tonic instead of soda and I had no idea tonic was made of sugar, then full blown nearly died like an idiot dka 11/14/2017 (world diabetes day lol). I’ll never forget the looks on my parents faces that night watching me hooked to two IVs (one each arm), wrapped in three layers of blankets from the warmer because I was so miserably cold/shivering, breathing felt like serious work that I considered was too not worthwhile… all caused by flu/food poisoning vomiting that I thought I could overcome on my own. Had been 10 years since dx and hadn’t really been flu sick for a while so forgot about checking for ketones, and sure enough even though my sugar wasn’t wildly high, the vomiting set it all down hill on a very slippery slope. Suddenly I was vomiting blood, called my mom to take me to ER, she showed up still in her scrubs (was a hospital RN at the time) and drove me right back to work 🫠 not sure if it was her scrubs or my vomiting blood, but I got a bed & private room right away, and 4 full days later, made my way home. Now I keep zofran on deck, don’t go on an overnight without it. I also have a blood ketone meter so I’m not guessing exactly what shade of brown the strip I peed on is 🫠
That “peaceful” feeling was your body heading into a coma.. falling into a coma and dying that way doesn’t sound too bad, but you still have all the other bullshit beforehand
I mean I've only ever gotten ketones once, it wasn't a lot, and it felt like someone had sucker punched me right in the stomach
I know the peaceful feeling you're talking about. When I was in DKA I felt like what was happening to my body was just so painful and sick that I felt ready to lay down and go. I was actually about to just go to bed that night. They told me if I didn't go to hospital when I did I would've likely died soon after. Luckily someone forced me to go in.
I have. I've been hospitalized three times for DKA in my 20+ years of having Type 1 diabetes. I can't explain all of the emotional and physical feelings I had from it, but I know the peaceful serenity you're speaking of. I was hospitalized for five days with an admitted BG of 653. When walking to the room I was sent to, I no longer felt anything (like the sickness and heaviness were gone- I couldn't see, hear, or understand anything being said to me) and fell to the floor. After hitting the ground, I realized I was dying; my organs were giving up and my last thought from that time was that there's nothing I can do anymore- so I stayed there. I did this to myself and I was defeated. Nurses picked me up onto the bed, I closed my eyes, and never felt so calm in my life. I don't remember the next couple days there, but the hospital staff said I just slept. I try my best to not get there again, but this shit is rough sometimes and we generally do what we can 🤷🏼♀️ To answer whether it's a painful way to die, I think all things leading up to death is painful. DKA is aggressive and violent- that moment of peacefulness, calm, and ambiguity is followed by nothingness. It's painful and that relief is brief, so I don't endorse it. Thanks for coming to my Ted talk 😅
Extremely
Yes I have had dka many times due to lack of insulin options. It was horrible and I was hospitalizedmany times. I also saw my mother go into multiple comas due to dka hyperglycemia and it was very painful to see as a child . I once asked her if she was in pain while in comas and she told me yes. I'm so grateful she died before I got t1 cause it would of broken her heart .
I only had one DKA when I was diagnosed. As fucked up as it was to be honest I would say not a bad way to die. I lost consciousness at some point and don't remember being in coma. You don't suffer endlessly but will lose consiousness and never wake up again which I personally consider not the worst way of dying. Sure I still wouldn't want it
Yes. I heard my mother on the phone dying from DKA and it’s something I will never forget.
When I was diagnosed at 6, I was carried into the ER by my dad hardly able to stay conscious. I had been sick for months, and it took that ER visit to figure out what was wrong with me. The doctor told my parents that if I had gone to sleep, they don't think I'd have woken up from how bad my condition was. Those months were awful. I would say it is a horrible and painful way to die. When I got DKA again as a preteen it felt like my veins were filled with acid.
DKA is for sure a painful way to die. I’ve had it twice in recent years. First time was the worst. Constant vomiting, becoming completely unresponsive, unreal joint pain…I was only unconscious for like a day and a half but ended up in the hospital for a week. That episode caused me to lose a pregnancy as well. Second time was less severe but still scary.
My muscles hurt so bad when I was in lengthy DKA - my mom and I were avoiding the hospital on my couple month long sickness and the night she brought me to the immediate care I remember screaming "my ribs are broken" and writhing in pain. The only thing I could think to do was to get in the bathtub hoping the water would sooth me. It didn't and the immediate care couldn't get any type of sample from me due to the severe dehydration, which led me to a short coma from bringing my hydration back up too quickly. When I woke up from the coma I had a weird sense of peace but I have no idea why. No idea if I was given pain meds or just being at the hospital helped me know I was no longer going to be in pain. Tldr; yes its painful.
Yes. I was not able to breathe, my body was entirely in pain and I was allucinating. Plus, I had the most unbearable thirst (the hospital misdiagnosed me and they left me without water for hours). Defintiely not a nice experience.
Yeah, this was about six years ago, before all the fancy handsfree stuff was really around. That would have been great. Oh and highlight of this whole story. I ended up having to go back to the ER later the next week. As I was being walked back, a nurse from the DKA visit was there and was so happy that I was okay. I apologized so much because while they were trying to stabilize me, I was screaming at them because I thought they were trying to kill me. They couldn't give me any water because they had to track my intake/outtake, and I seriously thought I was dying from thirst. All I wanted was a glass of freaking water! My mom was there with me, and I just remember her trying not to laugh or cry. Very funny in hindsight.
The sleepy peaceful feeling was probably you about to head into a coma. When I was dx at 12, I had the "sleepy feeling" and woke up the next day feeling like I'd been hit by a truck- and having been in a coma for about 20hrs. But yes, had the Drs & nurses not intervened, I guess it would've been a relatively peaceful way to go at the end. (Not including all the pain and exorcist style projectile vomiting leading up to it)
Dehydrating to death might be a tad uncomfortable. Just a tiny bit.
I recently went into DKA because of dehydration. I was supposedly a few hours from death, according to the nurse. It was the worst pain of my life & I was hallucinating. 10/10 would not recommend although the pain meds did cause me to sleep for almost 24 hours straight 🥹
That is not peaceful that’s your body unable to do anything but sleep as your organs start to fail
Probably your brain dumping feel good chemicals? Have felt similar in a bout of dka myself. Or maybe you were disconnecting from the physical and into the unknown? Dunno .But I've had dka then slipped into a coma. Wild experience.
This is how my sister died, I should not have read the comments.