short story: my mother-in-law was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes this week, she ended up in the er, and her blood sugar was 1700!!!!!
what is the highest blood glucose you have seen?
long story: what makes matters worse, is that she had a some labs including a 12 hr fasting blood glucose test on last wednesday at her doctors office, her doctor told her they would call her if there was any problems with the results. (this was all unknown to me until this past monday) she had been feeling sick all week and thought she had the flu.
the first i heard about the situation was monday morning, she called telling us she was real sick, and weak etc... and she thinks she has diabetes.
i said, why do you think you have diabetes? she said, i got some lab results in the mail yesterday and my blood sugar was high, my doctor told me that they would call me if there were any problems but they never called me? i asked her what the result was and she said 359. :angryfire :angryfire :angryfire my blood began to boil, i'm thinking to myself, how could a clinic let this result slip through the cracks and go six days without followup and treatment??? one of her daughters was on her way over there to bring her some things). meanwhile, i called the clinic very upset and wanted to talk to the drs office, to see how this was missed? they said they would leave a message and have the doctors office call me when he was done seeing pts.
shortly after my call, she gets a call from someone, she couldnt remember who telling her that she needs to go to the hospital soon to get checked out for her high test result (6 days latter but about an hour after my call :angryfire ) she ended going to the er via 911 because she was so weak and that is when they found her bg was 1700!!
thankfully the hospital was able to stablize her after several hours and remained monitored in icu and should be going home today or tomorrow. so my questions to you are:
what's the highest bg you have seen in a patient?
how would your clinic have handled this?
what is your facilities protocal for high lab results that obviously need attention?
i plan on contacting the clinic and following up with them so this kind of error does not happen again to someone else. please feel free to offer suggestions. tia!
