The mother’s gaze was as piercing as a hawk’s. “My daughter has never been like this,” she told me evenly. “This is not her.” I glanced at the nurse’s ER triage note: “Rita Suarez, 26-year-old, insulin-dependent diabetic, confused since this morning.”
Forewarned, I turned to the thin, pale woman on the stretcher who squirmed like an overtired child. “I feel so bad,” she mumbled.
“Ms. Suarez,” I asked, “does anything hurt you? Your head? Chest?”
My patient moaned and curled into a ball. Was she just being difficult? Sometimes patients treat questions as impositions, their attitude being, “You’re the doctor. You figure it out.”
The mother must have sensed my skepticism: “She woke up like this.”
“Was she ok last night?” I inquired neutrally.
“Fine,” the mother replied. “No fevers, no headache, sugars were fine. Her normal self.”
Ms. Suarez had been an insulin-dependent diabetic since childhood. She still lived ...
