Diabetes nonsense (Ep. 4)

In a thread I started a couple of days ago, I commented that Anna seems to be both a barrister and a solicitor, which seemed strange to me. (Still no replies yet.) I guessed that, since this is primarily a British show, that some or another Brit associated with it would have caught the anomaly and either removed it or inserted an explanation. Surely they wouldn't have let stand a huge gaping error...

Well, maybe they would. I've just seen episode 4, "A Higher Power." In it, a woman is kidnapped. She's Type I diabetic, and it is stated that, with no access to sugar or glucose medication, it is expected that she would soon die of hypoglycemia, low blood sugar. (I've deleted the recording, but it was something like that.)

I don't know where or how people get this kind of medication, but I've seen it before, in Alistair MacLean's Ice Station Zebra, in which (as I recall) someone among a group isolated on a remote research station steals sugar because he's diabetic and needs the sugar to survive. I read this long ago, even before I myself had diabetes (Type II), and knew it to be crazy.

Diabetes mellitus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diabetes_mellitus) is a disease in which the body is unable to process the sugar in the blood. This happens either because the pancreas cannot manufacture the natural insulin that processes the sugar, or because the body develops a sort of resistance to that natural insulin, and again cannot process the sugar. The early stages of the disease can be treated with oral medications, but after a certain point, diabetics take insulin to help their bodies process the sugar in their blood. No insulin -> HIGH blood sugar -> bad. Take insulin -> LOWER blood sugar -> better (normally--see next paragraph).

Sometimes, especially with "brittle" Type I diabetics, the balance between nutrition (which will generally raise blood sugar levels) and insulin (which reduces them) is difficult to achieve. For instance, if someone takes insulin in anticipation of a meal, and then misses that meal, the insulin may well lower blood sugar levels to a dangerous point--that is hypoglycemia, which can be a very serious condition, the remedy for which is to administer sugar or glucose in some form. But, as far as I know, it can happen only through circumstances involving insulin, and too much of that for the circumstances. An untreated diabetic--kidnapped, for instance, and unable to medicate with insulin--will develop hypERglycemia, high blood sugar levels.

As I say, I knew this stuff, roughly, many decades before I had diabetes myself. These days there's a lot of diabetes around, and I'm amazed that nobody seems to have caught the "danger of hypoglycemia" nonsense.