Diabetes on TV

I must admit, most portrayals of diabetes on TV bug the hell out of me. About 99 percent of shows that deal with diabetes have a simple plot of "separate the diabetic from his/her insulin and watch him/her go into a coma instantly!" I watched an episode of "Adam-12" in which a young boy ran away from the hospital a few hours after being diagnosed with juvenile diabetes.

The doctors pronounced gravely, "If we don't find him within four hours, he will go into a coma!" I'm thinking: go into a coma from what? If he's due for an insulin shot in four hours and doesn't get it, then he'll develop high blood sugar and it will be nasty and unpleasant, but he won't go into a coma as soon as he hits the four-hour mark. If four hours is the time his insulin peaks and he hasn't had anything to eat, then he might get low blood sugar and might pass out not long after he hits that four-hour mark, but he probably wouldn't go into a coma.

There was an episode of "Touched by an Angel" that dealt with a teenage girl being diagnosed with diabetes. In this episode, the girl's mother would go into her bedroom in the middle of the night, check her blood sugar (while the girl was still sleeping!) and give her an insulin injection. Every night. I'm going: "Huh?" The girl is about 18 years old, so I'm sure she is perfectly capable of testing her own blood sugar, and I can't see any purpose for giving her an injection in the middle of the night, every night. If it happens that her blood sugar is exceptionally high one night, then I can see taking an injection (which she should be capable of doing on her own) on that occasion, but not every single night. It is simply not practical and not realistic.

The climax of the episode has the girl having a fight with her boyfriend in the school gym, because he doesn't want her anymore due to her diabetes. She is trying to demonstrate to him that diabetes is not such a big deal. To prove this, she injects herself with what I can only guess is a massive amount of insulin, since it took effect so quickly, and promptly collapses from an insulin overdose. What that was supposed to prove to her boyfriend, I'm not exactly sure. Maybe it was supposed to make him feel sorry for her.

One show from the '70s that I enjoy watching on DVD is "Emergency!" They don't spend a lot of time dealing with diabetes, but for the most part they portray diabetes cases fairly realistically. The paramedics are called to deal with a man who is acting strangely; everyone thinks he's on drugs, but it turns out he's a diabetic whose blood sugar is dangerously low. A mother calls the paramedics because her son, who has been unwell for a while, won't wake up from his nap. It turns out the son has gone into diabetic ketoacidosis. The firefighters rescue a child and a teenager from a house fire, and can't figure out why the teenager is unconscious while her younger sister is fine. They haven't inhaled too much smoke from the fire, so what is wrong? The younger one tells the firefighters that her sister "hasn't been taking her medication like she's supposed to." Turns out the older sister has diabetes and hasn't been taking her insulin!

Even one of my favourite TV shows, "Boston Legal", didn't handle diabetes very well. One of the characters filed a class-action suit against the manufacturer of a popular snack cake that was sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup. Why? Because eating the snack cake apparently caused people to get Type 2 diabetes. Another lawyer character represented a client with Type 2 diabetes who was suing after being dropped from the clinical trial of a new diabetes drug. The lawyer treated the diabetic client as if she had a terminal disease and was going to drop dead any moment -- because, apparently, she was going to die if she didn't get this experimental diabetes drug.

I wish that when TV shows dealt with diabetes, they would take the time to research it and find out what it's all about. I wish they would stop over-dramatizing it. A diabetic is not going to go into a coma if their insulin injection is delayed for a few minutes, nor is he/she going to drop dead. He/she is also not going to drop dead if he/she eats sugar. You don't need to treat a diabetic person as if he/she has a terminal illness. But I guess that's just not dramatic enough for TV.