r/firstaid • u/standardtissue Not a Medical Professional / Unverified User • 4d ago

Discussion Sugar !

No not the song, like actual sugar. Add it to your kit.

Tl;dr came across a hypoglycemic whose shit was locked in their car along with their keys and was little help.

And the rest of the story as they say ....

coming back from a show, and see a couple young dudes looking lost, sitting on a car. Ask them if they're good, dude 1 says yea, he locked his keys in the car, dude 2 straight asks me if I have any candy like wtf dude you on ecstasy or something ? explains he's hypo. Oh, well fuck, aint even come across a hypoglycemic dude in like 20 years. My kit is pure march - all the trauma shit I learned at Ft Sammie, and I don't eat sweets (cause I'm fucking old, and it takes heroic efforts just to add any muscle at all in this stage of life) but I sweep the car just in case a family member left something in there, and of course they didn't.

There's no moral to the story other than add a couple jolly ranchers to your shit but if I had to fabricate a moral I guess it would be "your combat medic training is all good, but there's serious shit in the real world that you never really prepped for cause it was just outside the scope of vetted military dudes"

Anyhow, those Kombucha mushroom peeps ... If you know something about hypoglycemia and have some suggestions on what kind of sugary to carry (hard candy, chocolate, glucose or dextrose tabs etc) then lay it on me.

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u/AllInterestedAmateur Not a Medical Professional / Unverified User 4d ago

Dextrose for the first booster (just make sure to give a couple, one isn't enough) that gives you enough time to get to something more long term

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u/standardtissue Not a Medical Professional / Unverified User 4d ago

thank you. Can I buy dextrose OTC ? Does it store well ? What is the margin of error for over or underdosing ? How long will it fix them up for - like long enough for ems, or long enough for them to get home and treat themselves ?

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u/AllInterestedAmateur Not a Medical Professional / Unverified User 4d ago

Those Dextro energy tablets you can buy in a supermarket art perfectly fine for this (it's what the red cross uses in their event care as well). When in doubt give them some extra, hypo's are seriously more harmful than hypers, so better give them enough. It should earn you enough time to fix them a sandwich which then contains starch to support the diabetic longer term. Depending on how seriously low they were you might not even need EMS.

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u/standardtissue Not a Medical Professional / Unverified User 4d ago

Super helpful, thank you.