Thursday – There but For the Grace of God
May. 21st, 2009 04:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ninanevermore.
.
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The story in the news about the 12-year-old girl in Wisconsin whose parents prayed over her rather than have her treated for diabetes strikes a personal cord with me, since I was also diagnosed with diabetes as a child. Fortunately for me, my parents were not lunatics. Like the parents in Wisconsin, they were pious, church-going people. However, they had the good sense to take me to a doctor when I got sick and then learned to administer shots of insulin so I could live and grow up.
Every decade or so a case like this makes the news. You would think I wouldn't have any sympathy for the parents, but I kind of do. I'm cursed with the ability to look at both sides of every issue, and I suppose that if, as in this case, I'd been taught from the time I was little that doctors are an unnecessary evil (as opposed to my belief that they are a very necessary evil), I might grown up to have really bad judgement as well. I think the parents are unfit to raise their other children (the rest of whom have a heightened risk for Type 1 diabetes, and who should be watched for it), but I don't think they are bad people. I just think they are stupid people. Stupid and evil are different things, but the net effect of them is often the same. In most cases being stupid is not a crime. However, when your stupidity allows your child to die it gets upgraded from a mere character flaw to a crime pretty quick.
I feel sorry for them that they are so stupid, but most of my sympathy goes to their daughter. I know first hand what was happening in her body and what she was feeling as the diabetes began to kill her. I know that in days leading up to her death she was tired all the time and depressed, because that's how you feel when your blood glucose levels get too high. I know she was hungry - constantly, insatiably hungry - but that no matter how much food she ate it didn't help. Everything you eat either gets stored as fat or gets broken down into glucose (a.k.a., blood sugar). Insulin allows your cells to use the glucose for energy. Without insulin, the glucose built up in her body to toxic levels. A normal glucose level is right around 100 mg/dl. Without insulin, this level rises and rises. It goes to 500 mg, to 800 mg, to 1000 mg and higher.*
Since her body couldn't use any of the food she ate, it started breaking down her own tissue in a desperate bid for nourishment. This lead to a condition called diabetic ketoacidosis, where the breaking down of body fat causes an accumulation of ketones in the blood and urine. At this point, the ph level of her blood would have shifted from neutral towards acidic. She would have felt nausea, stomach pain, and begun to breathe very rapidly. This is what the witnesses at her mother's trial who said the girl sounded like she was "gasping for breath" were seeing. This is what killed her.
I've breathed like that before, and (since I grew up in a sane, rational family) it earned me a trip to the emergency room. I've felt that hunger before, and watched the flesh melt from my body as the days went by even as I ate everything I could get my hands on. But the hunger is nothing compared to the thirst. I know from experience that in her last conscious moments she was not crying only because she was too dehydrated to make tears. I know her lips were parched and that running her dry tongue over them didn't offer her any relief. Her body had lost the ability to retain water; her kidneys were using every drop she drank to try to flush the toxins from her bloodstream.
Then she went into a coma, and felt no more pain - thank heaven for small favors. Her life still could have been saved at that point, and at any point up until she stopped breathing.
I believe her parents loved her, and that they honestly grieve her. I might be justified in feeling rage toward them, but I can't muster it. I feel disgust, instead: the same emotion I would feel if I accidentally stepped in a big pile of dog excrement. I don't have anything against prayer. Heck, I pray myself. But you can pray next to a hospital bedside as well as you can pray anywhere else. If they had been willing to take her to the emergency room and pray for her there, their prayer that their daughter would grow up and be healthy and happy would probably have been answered.
Luckily for them, they don't know how their child suffered in the end.
I wish I didn't, either.
* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * # * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *
* The highest recorded blood glucose level ever in a live human being was 5600 mg/dl.
.
.
The story in the news about the 12-year-old girl in Wisconsin whose parents prayed over her rather than have her treated for diabetes strikes a personal cord with me, since I was also diagnosed with diabetes as a child. Fortunately for me, my parents were not lunatics. Like the parents in Wisconsin, they were pious, church-going people. However, they had the good sense to take me to a doctor when I got sick and then learned to administer shots of insulin so I could live and grow up.
Every decade or so a case like this makes the news. You would think I wouldn't have any sympathy for the parents, but I kind of do. I'm cursed with the ability to look at both sides of every issue, and I suppose that if, as in this case, I'd been taught from the time I was little that doctors are an unnecessary evil (as opposed to my belief that they are a very necessary evil), I might grown up to have really bad judgement as well. I think the parents are unfit to raise their other children (the rest of whom have a heightened risk for Type 1 diabetes, and who should be watched for it), but I don't think they are bad people. I just think they are stupid people. Stupid and evil are different things, but the net effect of them is often the same. In most cases being stupid is not a crime. However, when your stupidity allows your child to die it gets upgraded from a mere character flaw to a crime pretty quick.
I feel sorry for them that they are so stupid, but most of my sympathy goes to their daughter. I know first hand what was happening in her body and what she was feeling as the diabetes began to kill her. I know that in days leading up to her death she was tired all the time and depressed, because that's how you feel when your blood glucose levels get too high. I know she was hungry - constantly, insatiably hungry - but that no matter how much food she ate it didn't help. Everything you eat either gets stored as fat or gets broken down into glucose (a.k.a., blood sugar). Insulin allows your cells to use the glucose for energy. Without insulin, the glucose built up in her body to toxic levels. A normal glucose level is right around 100 mg/dl. Without insulin, this level rises and rises. It goes to 500 mg, to 800 mg, to 1000 mg and higher.*
Since her body couldn't use any of the food she ate, it started breaking down her own tissue in a desperate bid for nourishment. This lead to a condition called diabetic ketoacidosis, where the breaking down of body fat causes an accumulation of ketones in the blood and urine. At this point, the ph level of her blood would have shifted from neutral towards acidic. She would have felt nausea, stomach pain, and begun to breathe very rapidly. This is what the witnesses at her mother's trial who said the girl sounded like she was "gasping for breath" were seeing. This is what killed her.
I've breathed like that before, and (since I grew up in a sane, rational family) it earned me a trip to the emergency room. I've felt that hunger before, and watched the flesh melt from my body as the days went by even as I ate everything I could get my hands on. But the hunger is nothing compared to the thirst. I know from experience that in her last conscious moments she was not crying only because she was too dehydrated to make tears. I know her lips were parched and that running her dry tongue over them didn't offer her any relief. Her body had lost the ability to retain water; her kidneys were using every drop she drank to try to flush the toxins from her bloodstream.
Then she went into a coma, and felt no more pain - thank heaven for small favors. Her life still could have been saved at that point, and at any point up until she stopped breathing.
I believe her parents loved her, and that they honestly grieve her. I might be justified in feeling rage toward them, but I can't muster it. I feel disgust, instead: the same emotion I would feel if I accidentally stepped in a big pile of dog excrement. I don't have anything against prayer. Heck, I pray myself. But you can pray next to a hospital bedside as well as you can pray anywhere else. If they had been willing to take her to the emergency room and pray for her there, their prayer that their daughter would grow up and be healthy and happy would probably have been answered.
Luckily for them, they don't know how their child suffered in the end.
I wish I didn't, either.
* The highest recorded blood glucose level ever in a live human being was 5600 mg/dl.
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no subject
Date: 2009-05-22 03:41 pm (UTC)30 years later, I still want to smack that woman. She couldn't wet my lips with a paper towel without authorization? Whatever. :P
no subject
Date: 2009-05-22 10:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-22 03:42 pm (UTC)