ketoacidosis glucose bird wow, neato the thrill of discovering that my body was poisoning me i'll bet if someone poked me with a dagger and drew red and yellow flowers around the wounds, hummingbirds would have ben as hazardous as vampire bats to me 020703 ... kerry i looked up 'ketoacidosis' on yahoo search to get a better idea of what you're talking about but the words were all too big and i am really interested to know why you were in the hospital... could you put it in simpler terms for me? 020703 ... birdmad 2 weeks ago i was diagnosed as onstensibly a Type II diabetic (although now, in my current state, my doctors are now rather unsure whether i am type I or type II) this was after a period in which i lost 68 lbs in 3 months (that's over 5 lbs a week when the medically safe threshold of weight loss for my size is about 3 lbs a week) my co-workers began noticing that i was looking really run down and in addition to being intensely thirsty all the time, i was beginning to feel really tired my blood was no longer processing the sugar in it and so my kidneys were breaking it into new and slightly more fucked up compounds (various ketones, acids and proteins) and passing it all before i could use any of it... as a result, my body began to consume muscle and fat to keep itself operational (the weight loss and the lack of energy)...i also lost all my elecctrolytes in the process (the extreme weakness and more lack of energy) so last tuesday (6/25/02) i was so sick (went a total of 5 days without taking in anything other than about 5 gallons of water and 3 apples, plus the IV bags of potassium, magnesium, saline and antibiotics) that i ended up being taken to the emergency room and spent all the way into monday afternoon in the intensive_scare_unit my guess is that by the time i was diagnosed as a diabetic i was already in the early stages of ketoacidosis, since it was all the broken down feelings that made me go see the doctor in the first place in spite of all the water i was drinking, my body's attempt at forcible expulsion of the elevated sugar levels in my blood left me dehydrated funny, vicious cycle sort of thing began to occur...the blood sugar levels caused my body to become stressed and the stress caused my blood sugar levels to rise i was probably hours away from lapsing into a diabetic coma when i was admitted to the ER tuesday afternoon...i did not even feel like a living thing again until thursday afternoon and today, after all sorts of weirdness, i am finally home 020703 ... kerry thanks for explaining. i really hope everything works out... that sucks. 020704 ... birdmad it went a little something like this, i was less afraid of the concept that i might die then and there than i was of the concept that it was something far worse and i was going to have to die in some slow, inexorable crawl like the old lady in the next room who had priests and long unseen relatives coming to see her as her own slow crawl to the graveyard drew closer after a losing bout with some form of cancer (it's amazing the things you can pick up even when you are in a barely conscious and half-dead state yourself) I'm guessing that she must have finally died the same day they moved me out of ICU as i recognized someone in the stairwell from the torrent of people who moved in and out of the old woman's room later that night as my stir crazy insomnia returned with a vengeance that first night free of the IV's and monitors and i paced up and down my floor and jogged the stairwells down and rode the elevator back up, looking like a wacko with my hair disheveled from being mostly cooped up in bed for the previous week, six days worth of bed-head. But yeah, if it had been cancer or something like that, i would have figured out a way to pop open one of those nice oval windows with the nice view of the city lights and smacked into the parking lot with as little noise or hesitation as i could have managed 030921 ... katila jesse...cancer 050214 ... reminiscent bird 68 pounds was a typo it was 58 from the last week of March of 2002 to the tail end of June of that same year i went from my 2nd highest weight ever of 305 all the way down to 247 i have never been so tired and depressed as i was during that span of time. 060517 what's it to you? who go blather from