DKA
Diabetic Ketoacidosis (DKA) wasn’t something we were aware of and we had not heard of ketones or a ketone meter. The night she died, Jane woke up at 3am, screaming for me and vomiting. I dialled 999 and an ambulance arrived before I’d put the phone down.
One of the young paramedics immediately tested Jane’s blood sugar – which I had also done. He took out another meter and said her ketones were very high, and that she had to go to hospital straight away. But on the way to A&E, she had a cardiac arrest and they couldn’t revive her.
The pathologists took four months to decide the cause of death was Diabetic Ketoacidosis – (DKA) there was an autopsy. I only knew when I saw the words on the final death certificate.Â
DKA was a new and strange term to me. I googled it and found a huge amount of information about DKA symptoms on the Diabetes UK website. Jane had been suffering at least 75% of the symptoms in the weeks before. In the meantime, she had seen her diabetes consultant – who she got on well with, her diabetes nurse and GP. She had mentioned the symptoms but no one said anything about ketones.Â
Jane had diabetes for about 20 plus years but no one mentioned the word ketone or that you can get a handheld ketone meter. I just can’t think of her dying like that and that time, possibly unnecessarily.Â
"If we’d known sooner about ketones and that they were doing something nasty to her blood we might have been able to do something about it. Although we can’t say that we could have saved her, we might have been able to prolong her life."
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