Case Study Q & A

Interview with a Survivor of a Diabetic Coma

This interview took place at the University of Bridgeport in Spring 2000 as part of an endocrinology class with a patient suffering from diabetes Type I who explains how an illness can be used as a tool for personal discovery.

Q. What symptoms did you start noticing, physically or emotionally, before you were diagnosed with diabetes?
A. I was in Poland and started to get night sweats. My girlfriend at the time would wake up in the middle of the night and want to turn the heater off in the room, but there wasn’t a heater in the room. I was pumping off so much heat. And then I noticed that I craved sweets. I started to space out often during the day, lost a little weight, and it wasn’t until later when I was traveling through Europe, living sort of an itinerant lifestyle, not so good for the body, that I noticed I had to go to the bathroom a lot.

Q. Traditional Chinese Medicine views diabetes as a condition called Kidney yin deficiency. The symptoms match yours exactly. Symptoms of Kidney yin deficiency include excess urination, excess heat, hot sweats at night, and losing weight.
A. It got worse and worse until I couldn’t sleep at night. I had to get up 3 or 4 times during the night to urinate. Then, I started drinking copious amounts of water. By the time I was back in Poland, I had lost about 40 pounds, was getting tremors, and it became really hard to concentrate my thoughts, and I started to get cramping in my legs all the time.

Q. What was your eyesight like?
A. Toward the end it became like tunnel vision, I was losing my peripheral vision. All I wanted to do was sleep or drink water or eat sugar. Craving sugar for energy, because I had no energy. I thought I had cancer so I thought I was going to die. I made peace with people in my life and accepted it, because for some reason I just didn’t want to go to the doctor in Poland. I was really poor, and stubborn. When I returned from Poland, I went to the hospital, had my blood checked and went home. Soon the phone rang: “You better get in here right away”! My blood sugars were about 700 mg/dl when I got checked in. I walked to the hospital from my house, and halfway there I almost passed out in a snow bank, because I could hardly see. I was losing all control of my body. I drank like a liter of Gatorade, which was more sugar, and then I trudged off to the hospital. By this time I was losing consciousness, they threw me into a wheelchair, and I passed out. I remember waking up the next day with all of these tubes in me.

Q. When did you regain consciousness again, after how many hours?
A. A couple of hours later I regained consciousness. I was aware that I was inside my body, but I had no control of it, it was shut down. That was a really interesting time for me. I had an out of body experience where I was floating over the bed looking down at my body and all of these doctors. That really changed my perspective of life and what goes on, I had read about things like that in the Tao Te Ching and different religious texts, but I had never really had an experience, which was a big difference.

Q. What happened when you came out of the coma, how did you feel on the physical level, was your eyesight changed after having such high blood sugar?
A. I felt physically clear, like it was a new life. I felt reborn, almost, like I had come really close to death and I remember feeling relieved. I realized too at that point that it is just the body that dies, it is not whatever is inside the body that dies, so it changed my perspective of death as well, I no longer had to really fear it any more.

Q. What kind of life were you living before you had the diabetes, as opposed to how it changed after the coma?
A. Before I took my body for granted, it was very strong, I worked out and ate whatever I wanted. I ate a lot of meat. In a sense, I was using my body as a sort of laboratory. After that I slowly came away from all that because I realized that it wasn’t helping my mind, body, or life. I felt like I had been given a second chance and I didn’t want to blow it. I became involved in Tai Chi and Chi Gung, different yoga systems, Vipassana meditation, and I started to change my diet to a plant based vegetarian diet that I adhere to until this day. I feel really glad and much better, lighter, more clearly in my mind and more focused.

Q. Did you ever notice any signs of illness before diabetes?
A. Well I noticed even as a child, I had hypoglycemia, and I would end up overeating processed carbohydrates and dairy, and I think that really affected everything, by the time I was 20 or 21 my body couldn’t take those things anymore. When I came out of the hospital they put me on this huge diet to build my weight up again, it was all animal protein and milk. My body could take that for a few months but after that I got sick again because I was developing allergies to wheat and dairy and there was a lot of research showing that almost everyone with type one Diabetes has a high rate of albumin allergy to the milk.
    I do great when I stay away from dairy, that stuff really wrecks me, I had some dairy over Christmas, and I got a sinus infection easily. Whereas here, it’s really great where I work now, we do wheat grass; I find that it is amazing. We also have a lot of sprouted things, anything that has been sprouted has a lot more potency, and it’s a living food so its bioactive so to speak, whereas a lot of food that has been cooked is dead, they don’t have a lot of life force in them. Supposedly as a diabetic I am not supposed to eat that much fruit, but I find if I eat fruit I am fine, as long as I don’t eat a lot of junk food and fatty foods and hydrogenated foods. Apples peaches, plums pears, and the non-sweet fruits like cucumbers, pepper, olives, avocados, kumquats are great because they have beneficial fat in them, which is good for diabetics and most people actually. I’ve been blessed. I probably would have been in politics if I hadn’t gotten sick. The whole journey led away from that route and now I’m really interested in medicine and nutritional health and meditation, prayer, just living as sacred a life as possible.

Q. I’ve had a few patients also state their biggest gift in life is having their illness.
A. Yes, it’s great that it happened early in my life, and not when I’m 80 and on my deathbed.

Q. Have you had any lingering effects from the periods of high blood sugar?
A. No, they checked a few years ago to see about neuropathy, and they found that the response in my fingers and toes was like in the normal person, because I do a lot of yoga and I am a pretty active person. I have heard there is a high rate of impotence in diabetic persons, and I don’t want that, I like having sex so, its little things like that. Once in a while I get tingling in my fingers and my hands, but I had that before, as a kid my hands would always go to sleep.
My eyesight has actually improved in the last year or two because I have been doing the yogic exercises for the eye, I am looking at actually making my prescription less for my glasses, so far its good. The only thing I find is that when my blood sugar is a little bit off, it definitely affects my whole nervous system, my nerve transmitters, and my thoughts.

Q. Is there anything else you would like to add about your diabetes?
A. I’m happier, more centered, and grateful to be alive.