Northerner
Admin (Retired)
- Relationship to Diabetes
- Type 1
One Sunday evening I was busy looking after patients in intensive care when an emergency call came in from one of the surgical wards. A woman who?d had an operation on the previous Friday was ill with dangerously high blood-sugar levels.
Surgery triggers the body?s stress response, and as a result you produce more blood sugar. This is fine for most people because the body also increases its production of insulin to control the sugar levels. But if you?re a diabetic, as this patient was, this sugar surge needs expert management or you risk going into a coma, which can be fatal.
By the Saturday morning, her diabetes was already poorly controlled. Now if this had occurred during the normal working week, at the first sign of difficulties the patient would have seen a specialist diabetic doctor and the problem nipped in the bud. But on a weekend there was no diabetic specialist. Instead, the patient was seen by a junior doctor who didn?t realise the extent and danger of her problems.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/a...ffer-colleagues-refuse-weekends.html?ITO=1490
Surgery triggers the body?s stress response, and as a result you produce more blood sugar. This is fine for most people because the body also increases its production of insulin to control the sugar levels. But if you?re a diabetic, as this patient was, this sugar surge needs expert management or you risk going into a coma, which can be fatal.
By the Saturday morning, her diabetes was already poorly controlled. Now if this had occurred during the normal working week, at the first sign of difficulties the patient would have seen a specialist diabetic doctor and the problem nipped in the bud. But on a weekend there was no diabetic specialist. Instead, the patient was seen by a junior doctor who didn?t realise the extent and danger of her problems.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/a...ffer-colleagues-refuse-weekends.html?ITO=1490
