Diabetes mellitus: life in special circumstances?
To begin with – a case from the practice of Ambulance, one of many. A man of about thirty behaved extremely inadequately, he was a buoy, aggressive and red-faced. Profuse sweat ran down his face.
It happened in a large grocery store. The security service caught a public order violator, took them aside and sat down on a high chair for further proceedings, but in the course of a lively conversation the busoter somehow quieted down, rolled his eyes and lost consciousness.
In those days, and it was about twelve years ago, the teams still didn’t have a glucometer, or an instrument for measuring blood sugar. All hope was for the professionalism and experience of the doctor.
This patient was lucky with us. After injecting glucose into a vein, he came to his senses, said that he had been ill with diabetes for a long time and usually does not allow such punctures. But then it happened that insulin injected itself, but did not have time to have breakfast.
This is how hypoglycemia looks like – a condition in which the blood sugar level drops sharply. Very often such sufferers are picked up by the police, sometimes they are mistaken for alcoholics and left to lie on the street.
Therefore, citizens, if you happen to pass by an allegedly asocial element lying in a pool of your own sweat – don’t take sin into your soul, call an ambulance. Perhaps you will save a life.
Normal blood sugar is one of the basic conditions for the existence of a person as a biological object. And when it is rejected in one direction or another, the body experiences very serious difficulties.
It is clear that a whole internal biochemical laboratory works normally to maintain such an indicator – I will not paint the formulas, take a word.
However, it happens that for various reasons, a stable and reliable system fails. A serious metabolic disorder called diabetes mellitus develops. Blood glucose levels rise.
At first, the body simply tries to dilute excess sugar with water, so one of the first signs that suspect something was wrong is an excruciating, almost constant strong thirst. At this stage, a person is simply obliged to take care of his condition and seek help. That’s right, directive. Obliged .
There are a lot of patients with diabetes and it is becoming more every year. The reasons for this are darkness. The fact is that there are several types of diabetes .
The first type is insulin-dependent when special pancreatic cells stop producing a hormone called insulin. Such a disaster happens more often at a young age. In the occurrence of this type of diabetes, a hereditary predisposition plays a role, often severely transmitted viral infections.
Pediatric endocrinologists are well aware that every flu epidemic brings several cases of diabetes mellitus in children and adolescents. Mumps, colloquially – mumps, also annually increases the number of insulin-dependent patients.
Dear Parents! Be careful about your offspring! And if you see that the child is weakening, losing weight and drinking water in buckets – do not expect this to pass by itself. Urgently drag the child to the clinic and, if necessary, put him in a hospital.
Diabetes is a serious chronic illness. It is impossible to cure him, but to learn how to live in the proposed circumstances and minimize the consequences is most often quite affordable. And in no case do not try to treat the child with different useful herbs – do not waste time, a coma has not made a single person healthier or happier.
In the not-so-old days, when there were interruptions in the supply of insulin, we saw many very serious young patients. A twenty-five-year-old man died from kidney failure that developed against the background of almost untreated diabetes. A young woman who was passionately dreaming of a child did not give a damn about the exhortations of doctors and yet became pregnant. As a result, she died a couple of months after giving birth. The child was also born sick and lived quite a bit.
I don’t want to bully anyone. But it’s very bitter and insulting to watch people die because of their own ignorance. Feel free to ask for help on time!
Type 2 diabetes mellitus people usually eat on their own. A sedentary lifestyle, addiction to fast food, that is, to foods rich in easily digestible carbohydrates and animal fats, being overweight, not to say obesity, all this logically leads to a situation in which the body is not able to develop the necessary amount of insulin to recover the consequences “sweet life”. Large women are usually affected by this form of diabetes.
Type II diabetes, of course, is easier – in such patients diabetic coma is less likely to occur, the sugar content is adjusted not by daily injections, but by taking pills. But it is precisely because of the slow, apparently not very severe course, that the people very often refer to the disease absolutely do not care, and often do not have a clue that they already have diabetes in their lives.
Against the backdrop of untreated diabetes, such interesting things as coronary heart disease, cerebral arteriosclerosis, arterial hypertension progress with alarming speed. And the treatment of these ailments becomes extremely difficult and, frankly, ineffective, because changes in blood vessels are almost irreversible.
Of course, I simplify a lot. Diabetology is developing very quickly in terms of approaches to treatment, and in studying the causes of diabetes.
Prevention of diabetes, which endocrinologists and therapists are not tired of talking about, is actually simple and even pleasant with good habits. This is called just a healthy lifestyle.
Food culture, exclusion of sugar, white bread, cakes and pastries from the diet; frequent consumption of vegetables and fruits, possibly minimally processed culinary; sleep and rest, reasonable and feasible physical activity; refusal from alcohol abuse – these simple measures very significantly reduce the risk of diabetes. Everything is in your hands, dear citizens – well, at least a lot.
They say there are countries in the world in which diabetes is not considered a serious incurable disease, but simply a special circumstance of life. From the category of those circumstances that require, of course, an attentive attitude towards oneself, but by no means put an end to either a career, love, or even professional sports.
And routine counting of bread units, control of blood glucose, dose adjustment of insulin or other sugar-lowering drugs and other necessary procedures for diabetics do not become a tragedy that turns a person into a disabled person, but simply is performed automatically, somewhere between going to the toilet and brushing your teeth.
It is said that with this approach to your health, severe complications of diabetes are much less common – such as gangrene of the lower extremities, liver damage, vascular pathologies, and problems with the retina. And the life expectancy of diabetics is practically no different from the average.
They say that in any country you can reasonably, calmly and without panic treat your health. And to cope with problems as they arrive, at the stage when they are still being solved without much loss.
Diabetes is not a sentence. This is just a condition of a task called life.