Many people think that you can go into a diabetic coma if you don’t take care of your diabetes. However, that is only partially true. People who don’t take care of their diabetes are at risk for HONK, but you only go into a diabetic coma if you are dehydrated. If you are diabetic and become very dehydrated, you can go into a diabetic coma from high blood sugar even when you take good care of diabetes.
Just because you went into a diabetic coma from high blood sugar doesn’t mean you have poorly controlled diabetes. This is a simple fact that even many healthcare providers fail to understand. That is because we have been led to believe that bad things only happen to people with diabetes when they don’t take care of themselves. It may be true regarding long-term consequences of diabetes, but it’s not true for a diabetic coma from high blood sugar. As I will explain shortly, it can happen to anyone with diabetes.
When your blood sugars go up, you start to lose glucose in your urine. Glucose is highly soluble in water, so it draws water. When you lose glucose in the urine, you lose a lot of water with it. That is why people with uncontrolled diabetes are constantly thirsty and often urinating. Thirst is the body’s main defense preventing these people from going into HONK. As long as they keep drinking water, the blood sugar doesn’t rise to the level needed for a diabetic coma. Diabetics may have high blood sugars all the time, but if they are losing sugar and water in the urine while adding water to the body, these two processes balance out the blood sugar levels to make them high but not too high.