Her roomate

Actually, I say it went smoothly, but I almost forgot that Caren's roommate was almost assassinated at 3am! I know I'm only a lowly paramedic, but even I see the potential danger in giving a 60 units of insulin to a woman who has been NPO (no food or drink) in preparation for a colonoscopy and has a blood sugar of 99. Within a matter of minutes, her mental status declined to moaning and groaning, her blood sugar plummeted to 24 and the nurses were running in and out of the room like their clothes were on fire. I was awake and kept to myself. I was about to jump through the curtain when I heard them trying to administer oral glucose gel to her. We have pretty strict rules against giving oral medications to unconscious people! The last thing this little lady needs is an aspiration pneumonia added to her laundry list of troubles! I heard her start to mumble to them and decided she was probably awake enough to handle the glucose gel. Fortunately there was a single nurse on the floor that had a clue and ran the show. The got her some IV dextrose and got her sugar up enough that she could talk. The first thing she said, in her thick asian accents was, "That was no good!" Apparently referring to the near death experience she endured at the hands of her nurse. All the nurse said was that she had given her the same dose of insulin the night prior when her blood sugar was 107 and she did fine. What the good nurse did not realize, although she definitely should have known, was that the patient had been on an IV drip that contained dextrose the night prior. It was artificially maintaining her blood sugar level and allowed her to tolerate the insulin. They discontinued that drip earlier that morning...oops.