Nina Wadia's terror as son's eyes roll back in head before doctor's 'angry' diagnosis

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Northerner

Northerner

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When Nina Wadia’s son Aidan said he finally felt well enough to go on a delayed family holiday to Thailand, she was delighted. It had been a difficult year, with the 10-year-old struggling to recover from a virus.

Despite consultations at the local hospital and then Great Ormond Street, nobody seemed to know why Aidan was still regularly vomiting. But eight months on, he finally seemed to have recovered. EastEnders actress Nina, her husband Raiomond Mirza, daughter Tia and Aidan headed off for their delayed getaway.

“Aidan was absolutely fine for the first week,” Nina, 52, remembers. “We were zip-lining, we were jumping off cliffs.” But then Aidan started being sick again, developed an insatiable thirst and, Nina noticed, was the only one in the family getting up in the night to pee.

Despite eating five meals a day, he was still “really skinny,” says Nina.

Then, on the plane home, Aidan collapsed. “His eyes rolled back in his head,” she recalls. “It was terrifying.”

www.mirror.co.uk

Nina Wadia's terror as son's eyes roll back in head before Dr's angry diagnosis

Actress Nina Wadia tells Lizzie Catt about the terrifying moment her son collapsed on an airplane and why she is calling for a new diabetes monitor to be made available on the NHS
www.mirror.co.uk www.mirror.co.uk

Shame about the little bit about the virus attacking his pancreas, when it was his immune system doing the attacking, triggered by the virus. Dreadful that no-one tested him for diabetes in their earlier consultations :(
 
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Shocking that no-one tested his blood sugar before then (I presume). It should be routine. It’s hardly difficult or expensive.
 
Mmmm, but - how many GP surgeries have a) got a glucometer and b) any in date lancets and strips? If they suspected anything like this, they'd just send you to A&E these days. Ours doesn't even do blood tests these days, just give you a form with the tests written on it anf your NHS info, then where we live we have to ring Swiftqueue to book an appt - usually about a fortnight hence and then a week-ish after that we hear from the GP surgery, but only if they're not all 'normal', if they are considered normal we hear nothing and if we want to know the results we must ring on a Tuesday lunchtime between X and Y. Nowt seems to be of great urgency.

For both of us, they've just got round to dealing with things instigated by hospital visits in July.
 
trophywench said:
Mmmm, but - how many GP surgeries have a) got a glucometer and b) any in date lancets and strips?
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I know paramedics do, but I guess quite possible GP surgeries don't? Can measure your blood pressure, weight, height, but maybe not that much else.

(Blood tests at mine can come back quickly: had this year's bloods taken on Tuesday a couple of weeks ago, expecting to see my GP (who normally does my reviews) in a couple of weeks, but they called later on Tuesday asking if I could come in on Wednesday (when a DSN visits), presumably because they'd had a cancellation or something. So I came in and while most of the bloods hadn't come back (specifically HbA1c), some had.)
 
GPs all have ketones and glucose on their urine testing dip sticks even if they don’t have a blood glucose meter. They should have come up there, I know my GP goes into a panic when the urine dip has ketones and calls diabetes department
 
If they don't have BG meters then they really ought to, bearing in mind that around 8% of the population has diabetes (of all types) and a significant proportion is undiagnosed. The likelihood is that an even greater proportion of people seeking medical help have diabetes. I remember when I was diagnosed and put in the Cardiac Care Unit - 90% of the people in there had diabetes 😱 Perhaps @Abi could tell us? 🙂
 
I would have thought that most GP surgeries should have a BG meter. Ours does, I don’t know if they use it very often though because when my daughter was diagnosed and they got a reading of HI they had to plough through the instructions to find out what that meant, as the hospital referral had to have a number on it! (It went to a maximum of 33.3 so they had to put that)
 
I have not noticed recently but my surgery used to have boxes of new meters in the nurses consultanting room.
 
Ours certainly has meters. The nurse hands them out to newly diagnosed T2s. Or did anyway before lockdown. The same nurse tested me when I was first diagnosed and like @Sally71 's daughter, it just said "Hi".

I'm more wondering what happened on the plane when Aidan collapsed. AFAIK there's nothing in the first aid kits that would have helped. I'll enquire of serving crew. However it's a 13 hour flight, so I wonder if they diverted.
 
I asked and most of the crew knew how to treat a diabetic coma due to hyperglycaemia, but they have to have special permission to get the injectable fluids out of the first aid kit and only a Doctor can admninister them. As he was undiagnosed then there was little they could do.
 
My daughter and son-in-law got called to an medical emergency on a flight back from Malaysia and the captain was willing to follow their recommendation about whether to divert or not. There was quite a lot of equipment and medication available on the plane. In the end they made it to Heathrow and had an ambulance waiting on the runway.
 
Northerner said:
If they don't have BG meters then they really ought to, bearing in mind that around 8% of the population has diabetes (of all types) and a significant proportion is undiagnosed. The likelihood is that an even greater proportion of people seeking medical help have diabetes. I remember when I was diagnosed and put in the Cardiac Care Unit - 90% of the people in there had diabetes 😱 Perhaps @Abi could tell us? 🙂
Click to expand...
Apologies for late reply. Most GPs i would have thought nowadays would have access to a meter. If used infrequently then batteries may be flat and strips out of date. I work in a practice with a dispensary and a diabetes nurse practitioner with a plentiful supply of different meters so could always either find strips or a different meter
 
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