As I haven't really gotten as much field experience as I'd like and am unemployed, I haven't really had to handle a really bad hyperglycemia yet. The weirdest blood glucose I've encountered was a hypoglycemia. Female, early 20's, hx of lupus, had been doing lots of coke and that whacky weed all through the night before, and woke up in insulin shock. When we got there at the start of the shift, the fire department was already getting ready to bring her down for us (if the house is two floors, the sick person will always be placed upstairs). On the way down, the fire department tells us they got a glucose of 17. We get her in the truck, get a blood glucose off the IV, it comes back 180. So, we take a finger stick and it comes back an 8. So, we start pushing D50 and rocknrolling for the hospital. After a whole amp of D50 and a few minute's wait, we re-check, and her glucose has gone all the way up to 18. We piggyback some D5W on a NS just before the hospital to keep that sugar going up, and hopefully bring her out of unresponsiveness. When we get to the ER, there's no change, all other V/S relatively stable.
When we checked back later that day, we heard they gave her another amp in the ER as well as finished out that bag of D5W with little result. Then, out of the wild blue yonder, a few hours later her blood glucose shot up to over 300, if I remember right. It was pretty wild.
