Say you’re a Type 1 diabetic who is lost in the wilderness. No test strips, no insulin, no food. You don’t know how or when you might be rescued. You do have a travel partner who is not diabetic.
What do you do? What do you eat? How do you cope?
You eat as low carbs as you can, drink plenty of water and hope for the best. Prior to insulin patients were treated with near-starvation diets. Here is an example of a girl who lives three years before being saved by insulin’s discovery.
What psychobunny said. Granted, you’re not likely to find a lot of highly processed carbs in the wilderness (unless you come across someone’s cabin which is filled with Twinkies, say), but even complex carbs will raise the blood sugar, sometimes by quite a lot. I’m an insulin dependent diabetic, I take a LOT of insulin, and I suspect that I’d be dead in about a week if I didn’t have access to insulin. I’m not sure how long it would take. I take insulin twice a day, and if I miss my dose, I can feel it within a couple of hours, even though I take the long acting stuff (Lantus).
I’d probably find a place that was easily recognizable, and tell my partner to go get help. After missing a couple of doses of insulin, I’d be too sluggish to move. Two doses is 24 hours. So I’d increase my chances and my partner’s chances if I stay put and my partner goes for help.
I also have mobility issues. I can walk, but not very fast, and I stumble. I use a cane or walking stick to get around even in the city. I don’t need a wheel chair (manual or powered), though I’ve used a couple of them in the bigger stores about half a dozen times. My doctor wants to prescribe one for me, but I’m very resistant to this idea. I’d rather walk slowly than quickly zip around on a power chair.
Ironically, I used to enjoy hiking and camping when I was younger.
Glad to hear that she had a fairly normal lifespan. I myself became Type I diabetic when I was 42. Using her success, I could live to 104! 
Just the other day, I went to work without refilling my insulin pump (which supplies about 3 days worth of bolus & basal insulin). I was about to eat a snack that my dean brought in, when I noticed I had but 2 units of insulin left (when my basal usage is 0.8 units/hr). She was very understanding (having gestational diabetes when she was pregnant), and let me go home and refill.
My training on the pump told me that the insulin I use has about a 4-hour active period in my body. So, waiting 8 hours before I went home would’ve meant I would be insulinless for about 4 hours.
I did manage to live 2 weeks between the onset of my diabetes symptoms and the start of treatment. But I also have a childhood friend who became type I and has had 2 episodes of DKA in his life when he neglected his insulin regimen. Better safe then sorry.
Gah! that drives me nuts!
We have a friend who got a pump about 10 years ago, and that vacation [Pennsic War] he snacked on junk food and candy on the basis that ‘all he had to do was tweak his dose’ :smack::smack::smack::mad: He is a major brittle type 1 anyhow, screwing around like that is just stupid. I get nervous if I need to tweak mine a couple units because of going to a wedding and doing a piece of cake … I prefer to do my normal birthday splurge of all you can eat lobster. Low carb splurges are much healthier for us! [I had a swedish friend suggest smorgastarta, I want to make this for my birthday this year 
]
How long can a diabetic live if they only ate fats and proteins, no carbs at all? Assuming that utilizing sugar is the only problem, it would seem as if one could live a more or less normal life as long as they never ate any (think Atkins diet but no carbs at all) and ensured that they supplemented with nutrients normally obtained from fruits and vegetables (a starvation diet? [ref psychobunny] Isn’t that a bit extreme?).
About a third of the protein you eat can be converted to carbohydrates via the gluconeogenisis pathway. Even if you ate only fats, the brain needs glucose, and your body will convert its own muscle tissue to produce it. I don’t know if an insulin dependant diabetic could survive on a ultra low carbohydrate diet, but I suspect that if it were that easy a lot more folks would be doing it.
“Starvation diet” generally means any diet with so few carbs in it that ketosis results. This generally happens on diets with less than 50 grams/day of carbs.
There’s not a lot of research out there on how folks do on zero carb diets longterm. Carbs are not essential for survival, but a lot of the vitamins and trace minerals that go with them are.
But if you’re a type I diabetic with no access at all to insulin, getting your carb intake to zero and subsisting on fats and protein is definitely the thing to try.
I know this is a hypothetical, but just to ask: Is it considered OK for diabetics to go on remote wilderness trips, or even trips by themselves in civilized areas? I know if I was I’d be scared of this type of sitituation happening, or say going into a coma while driving alone in a remote area. I’m “pre-diabetic” so it’s not the same thing (I’m not fat, just have lousy metabolism), so I’ve been wondering about such things.
It should be fine for a healthy diabetic, if they take their meds, monitoring equipment, and follow their diets.
Y’know, I have no idea how long I’d last, but like everyone else says, you can stave off DKA for a good long time if you avoid carbs. Not forever, but a near-starvation diet was the recommended treatment for diabetics before insulin.
If you had access to alcohol, even better. It lowers blood sugar as well.
That said, I don’t see any long camping trips in the wilderness for me in the future. I’d be too jumpy about my insulin going bad, or running out of carbs, or accidentally dropping all my diabetes supplies into a river or having them stolen by a bear to really be able to enjoy it much. Temper that with I never really enjoyed long-term camping trips in the wilderness to begin with, and it’s just not a risk I’m willing to take.
It’s an interesting question. I’ve never had anything bad actually happen to me because of diabetes - the worst I’ve experienced are the occasional low blood sugar that is quickly detected & corrected by eating candy. No DKA, no passing-out-in-the-street, etc. It’s kind of a weird thing and sometimes I wonder how long it would take for something bad to really happen if I threw out the pump. Not enough to actually do it, but yeah, I do think about it sometimes.
I think peoples’ view of diabetes and diabetics is skewed by those who neglect their condition and have problems in public. I know many diabetics who do the tedious work of managing their condition and go along living healthy, uneventful lives without problems, but because they don’t attract attention they aren’t noticed or thought of when someone says “diabetes”.
That’s the kind of diabetic my mother is… she’s had two kidney transplants and was confined to a wheelchair before she spinal cord issues (also related albeit once removed to her diabetes.).
She doesn’t see the relationship between her actions and her current state. She says it’s her Dr’s fault. :smack:
Aome people are just major buttheads about it. Back when mrAru was in an ambulance crew in Va Beach1, there was a brittle diabetic with some sort of heart condition, he lived on the third floor and had a reason to call the ambulance about once a month … and he weighed almost 500 pounds :eek::eek::eek:
Personally, if I was Va Beach1, I would have told the guy that he had to move into a ground floor apartment. His buttheadedness was putting the poor crewmembers into physical danger every time they had to go in and extract him from a third floor apartment. mrAru said the ambulance crews at VB1 would have volunteered to move his belongings for him if he indicated he was moving to a ground floor apartment.:rolleyes:
I can only assume the guy is now dead, this was just over 20 years ago. I can not see him able to maintain for this long [or maybe if he got moved into a residence home where they would forcibly take care he stuck to his meds and diet!]
I have a friend who is a nurse, and in some sort of administrative job that has her overseeing Medicaid patients. She has a huge number of diabetics that she deals with on a regular basis, and her stories are amazing to me. She has several patients who call 911 and end up in an ambulance about once a week due to easily-controllable diabetes related incidents. She also says that what she’s told to counsel people about is keeping their blood sugar below 250. To put that in perspective, I personally shoot for around 100, and the number of times I’ve seen 250 in the last couple years I can count on one hand. I see 250, and I start freaking.
I get it that diabetes is a difficult condition and takes a bit of work to control, but seriously - for a lot of people, getting it under control mostly involves not eating shit that’s bad for you, and getting up and moving around a bit every day. I can’t get my head around consistently eating crap that you know will make you blind/damage your kidneys/end up getting your legs or feet amputated. WTF people! That cupcake is NOT worth it.
I think the problem is many people don’t get the nutritional training they should. I know maybe 10 or so years ago I got out of the Navy’s diabetes program into a civilian one, and they sent me to a nutritionist consult. The Navy never sent me to one nor had one available. Thankfully I went to one at a good hospital back in 80 when I got dx the first time. Another part of the problem is many people just plain give up, figuring quality of life now is more important to them than quality of life in 10 years … :rolleyes:
I have a vested interest in making sure I shuffle off this mortal coil with almost all the body parts I started with [had a hysterectomy. Those parts can go burn in hell as far as I am concerned, cruel nasty parts they was!:D]
I’m pretty much the same. I’m now thirty seven and became a Type-1 sometime around my nineteenth birthday. I did a lot of hiking and suchlike when I was younger, but these days I get nervous if I am away from civilisation. As in properly away from civilisation, not if I am just on a car trip somewhere.
In all my time I’ve only had one major incident, which was last year. I’ve been struggling with my doses as my level of exercise increased dramatically (I got involved in Stockholm’s Lindy Hop scene and dance 2-3 times a week minimum and, well, I’ve got a new girlfriend too 
) which has meant I have had to really, REALLY reduce my doses. Just I couldn’t get it quite right. I think I’d settled into a comfortable routine that was working and with the changes ended up in a period where I just couldn’t keep my blood sugar up, I was continually having to take dextrosol every few hours. Let’s just say it was irritating. And then one day I collapsed in town.
Going the other way, what are people’s record highs? When I was diagnosed in 1993 the doctor told me he rarely sees them as high as I was. On the European scale it was 42.8 which in US terms is … runs off to a website … 770.4.
Doh! That’s hugely high!
The highest I’ve seen is 450 (25 in non-US scale), and that was shortly after diagnosis. My A1c was around 12.5 if I recall, and that corresponds to an average of 312/17. Think the lowest I’ve recorded is 38/2.
I get pissy now if I see anything above 200/11 or below about 60/3.
I keep seeing the thread title and thinking “Reality show!”