Home Is Where the Pickles Are

By Jan Chait When I said last week I would write more about doctors, little did I know what was about to transpire. Flying to a major US city to attend a meeting, I told the flight attendant a couple of times I was having trouble breathing. His reaction was along the lines of "Uh-huh." Then I remember a brief moment of moving and the word "ambulance." Nothing more until: "Do you know where you are? What's the date? Who's the vice president?" And thus began my weeklong stay in a well-known east coast hospital. If it's Tuesday, I'm probably still there. At any rate, I missed the meeting. And I met a lot of docs. And, by the end of the week, I had questions of my own, such as: "They're still using NPH? If I say I need to use the bathroom, why does it take seven hours to get a bedside potty there? Why isn't there a bucket on it? Is the prisoner next door dangerous?" And last, but not least, "why do I never get the dill pickles I request for my hamburger?" Or perhaps that should be, "Will I ever get out of here?" They may have figured out I have private insurance and wanted to keep me! They certainly put up enough hoops for me to jump through. They took my insulin pump off in ICU. Hey, I can relate. I wasn't exactly what you'd call "conscious." From then until they handed it back over to me, I got injections of NPH. This was ordered by an endocrinologist. Then she messed around with my pump settings. I was not amused. I was running high. Because my blood pressure dropped low, the...
Source: Diabetes Self-Management - Category: Diabetes Authors: Source Type: blogs