To Your Good Health
By Paul G. Donohue, M.D.
Very Low Blood
Sugar Can Lead to Coma
DEAR DR. DONOHUE:
Last year I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. I
take half a diabetes tablet and test my blood
three times a week. The monograph I received with
the tablets plus everything else I’ve read
all say the same thing: If blood sugar is very
low, the patient should drink a regular soft
drink or eat table sugar, honey or candy. Nowhere
does it say what to do when blood sugar spikes.
Not long ago, my
blood sugar tested at 88 (4.9), a little low for
me. I began to feel really bad. I ate breakfast
and tested again. My reading was 244 (13.5). I
took the other half-tablet, and in time I felt
better. What will take blood sugar down in a
hurry? -- S.H.
ANSWER: Insulin
takes blood sugar down rapidly. Most of the time,
a high blood sugar doesn’t have to be
lowered quickly. You can do exactly as you did
and check the sugar later.
When blood sugar
remains very high for a more than a couple of
days, people with type 2 diabetes can get into
trouble. Frequent urination, thirst, nausea and
weakness are indications that blood sugar is
high. If it stays high, then people with type 2
diabetes can develop what’s called
hyperosmotic hyperglycemia, something that can
make them lethargic and produce a coma.
That almost never
happens, and it takes time for it to develop. So
long as you’re checking your sugar, so long
as it doesn’t stay at 300 to 500 for a
matter of more than a day, and so long as you
have no symptoms, there is no urgency to rapidly
lower the sugar.
Low blood sugar,
on the other hand, can quickly put a person into
a coma if blood sugar is not raised rapidly. Very
low sugar levels can produce coma, brain damage
and death. The methods you suggest to raise sugar
are fine.
LETTERS from
a SELF-MADE
MERCHANT
to his SON.
by George Horace
Lorimer
First
published October, 1902
Being the Letters written by John Graham, Head
of the House of Graham & Company,
Pork-Packers in Chicago, familiarly known on
‘Change as "Old Gorgon Graham," to
his Son, Pierrepont, facetiously known to his
intimates as "Piggy."
No.8
FROM John Graham, at Hot
Springs, Arkansas, to his son, Pierrepont, at the
Union Stock Yards in Chicago. Mr. Pierrepont has
just been promoted from the mailing to the
billing desk and, in consequense, his father is
feeling rather "mellow" toward him.
VIII
Hot Springs,
January 15, 189-
Dear Pierrepont:
They’ve run me through the scalding vats
here till they’ve pretty nearly taken all
the hair off my hide, but that or something else
has loosened up my joints so that they don’t
squeak any more when I walk. The doctor says
he’ll have my rheumatism cured in thirty
days, so I guess you can expect me home in about
a fortnight. For he’s the breed of doctor
that is always two weeks ahead of his
patients’ condition when they’re poor,
and two weeks behind it when they’re rich.
He calls himself a specialist, which means that
it costs me ten dollars every time he has a look
at my tongue, against two that I would pay the
family doctor for gratifying his curiosity. But I
guess this is about the only outlet for marketing
the surplus of young doctors.
Reminds me of the
time when we were piling up canned corned beef in
the stock faster than people would eat it, and a
big drought happened along in Texas and began
driving the canners in to the packing-house
quicker than we could tuck them away in tin. Jim
Durham tried to "stimulate the
consumption," as he put it, by getting out a
nice little booklet called, "A Hundred
Dainty Dishes from a Can," and telling how
to work off corned beef on the family in various
disguises; but, after he had schemed out ten
different combinations, the other ninety turned
out to be corned-beef hash. So that was no use.
But one day we got
together and had a nice, fancy, appetizing label
printed, and we didn’t economize on the gilt
- a picture of a steer so fat that he looked as
if he’d break his legs if they weren’t
shored up pretty quick with props, and with blue
ribbons tied to his horns. We labeled it,
"Blue Ribbon Beef - For Fancy Family
Trade," and charged an extra ten cents a
dozen for the cans on which that special label
was pasted. Of course, people just naturally
wanted it.
There’s
nothing helps convince some men that a thing has
merit like a little gold on the label. And
it’s pretty safe to bet that if a fellow
needs a six or seven-syllabled word to describe
his profession, he’s a corn doctor when you
come to look him up in the dictionary. And then
you’ll generally find him in the back part
of the book where they tuck away the doubtful
words.
But that
isn’t what I started out to say. I want to
tell you that I was very, very glad to learn from
your letter desk that you had been promoted to
the billing desk. I have felt all along that when
you got a little of the nonsense tried out of you
there would be a residue of common-sense, and I
am glad to have your boss back up my judgment.
There’s tow things that you naturally
don’t expect from human nature - that the
widow’s tombstone estimate of the departed,
on which she is trying to convince the neighbors
against their better judgment that he went to
Heaven, and the father’s estimate of the
son, on which he is trying to pass him along into
a good salary, will be conservative.
I had that driven
into my mind and spiked down when I hired the
widow’s son a few years ago. His name was
Clarence - Clarence St. Clair Hicks - and his
father used to keep books for me when he
wasn’t picking the winners at Washington
Park or figuring out the batting averages of the
Chicagos. He was one of those quick men who
always have their books posted up half an hour
before closing time for three weeks of the month,
and spend the evenings of the fourth hunting up
the eight cents that they are out on the trail
balance. When he died his wife found that his
life insurance had lapsed the month before, and
so she brought Clarence down to the office and
asked me to give him a job.
Clarence
wasn’t exactly a "pretty boy" in
fact, he looked to me like another of his
father’s bad breaks; but his mother seemed
to think a heap of him. I learned that he would
have held the belt in his Sunday school for
long-distance verse-reciting if the mother of one
of the other boys hadn’t fixed the
superintendent, and that it had taken a general
conspiracy of the teachers in his day-school to
keep him from walking off with the good-conduct
medal.
I couldn’t
reconcile those statements with Clarence’s
face, but I accepted him at par and had him
passed along to the head errand boy. His mother
cried a little when she saw him marched off, and
asked me to see that he was treated kindly and
wasn’t bullied by the bigger boys, because
he had been "raised a pet."
A number of
unusual things happened in the offices that
morning, and the head office boy thought Clarence
might be able to explain some of them, but he had
an alibi ready every time - even when a
bookkeeper found the vault filled with cigarette
smoke and Clarence in it hunting for something he
couldn’t describe. But as he was a new boy,
no one was disposed to bear down on him very
hard, so his cigarettes were taken away from him
and he was sent back to his bench with a warning
that he had used up all his explanations.
Along toward noon,
a big Boston customer came in with his little boy
- a nice-plump stall-fed youngster, with black
velvet pants and hair that was just a little
longer than was safe in the stock-yards district.
And while we were talking business, the kid
wandered off to the coat room, where the errand
boys were eating lunch, which was a pretty
desperate place for a boy with velvet pants to
go.
As far as we could
learn from Willie when he came out of his
convulsions, the boys had been very polite to him
and had insisted on his joining in a new game
which Clarence had just invented, called playing
pig-sticker. And, because he was company,
Clarence told him that he could be the pig.
Willie didn’t know just what being the pig
meant, but, as he told his father, it didn’t
sound very nice and he was afraid he
wouldn’t like it. So he tried to pass along
the honor to some one else, but Clarence insisted
that it was "hot stuff to be the pig,"
and before Willie could rightly judge what was
happening to him, one end of a rope had been tied
around his left ankle and the other end had been
passed over a transom bar, and he was dangling
head foremost in the air, while Clarence
threatened his jugular with a lath sword. That
was when he let out the yell which brought his
father and me on the jump and scattered the boys
all over the stock yards.
Willie’s
father cancelled his bologna contract and marched
off muttering something about "degrading
surroundings brutalizing the young;" and
Clarence’s mother wrote me that I was a bad
old man who had held her husband down all his
life and now wouldn’t give her son a show.
For, naturally, after that little incident, I had
told the boy that had been raised a pet that he
had better go back to the menagerie.
I simply mention
Clarence in passing as an instance of why I am a
little slow to trust my judgement on my own. I
have always found that, whenever I thought a heap
of anything I owned, there was nothing like
getting the other fellow’s views expressed
in figures; and the other fellow is usually a
pessimist when he’s buying. The lady on the
dollar is the only woman who hasn’t any
sentiment in her make-up. And if you really want
a look at the solid facts of a thing you must
strain off the sentiments first.
I put you under
Milligan to get a view of you through his eyes.
If he says that you are good enough to be a
billing clerk, and to draw twelve dollars a week,
I guess there’s no doubt about it. For
he’s one of those men that never show any
real enthusiasm except when they’re cussing.
Naturally,
it’s a great satisfaction to see a streak or
two of business ability beginning to show under
the knife, because when it comes closing time for
me it will make it a heap easier to know that
some one who bears the name will take down the
shutters in the morning.
Boys are a good
deal like the pups that fellows sell on street
corners - they don’t always turn out as
represented. You buy a likely setter pup and
raise a spotted coach dog from it, and the
promising son of an honest butcher is just as
like as not to turn out a poet or a professor. I
want to say in passing that I have no real
prejudice against poets, but I believe that, if
you’re going to be a Milton, there’s
nothing like being a mute, inglorious one, as
some fellow who was a little sore on the poetry
business once put it. Of course, a packer who
understands something about the versatility of
cottonseed oil need never turn down orders for
lard because the run of hogs is light, and a
father who understands human nature can turn out
an imitation parson from a boy whom the Lord
intended to go on the Board of Trade. But on
general principles it’s best to give your
cottonseed oil a Latin name and to market it on
its merits, and to let your boy follow his bent,
even if it leads him into the wheat pit. If a
fellow has got poetry in him it’s bound to
come out sooner or later in the papers or the
street cars; and the longer you keep it bottled
up the harder it comes out, and the longer it
takes the patient to recover. There’s no
easier way to cure foolishness than to give a man
leave to be foolish. And the only way to show a
fellow that he’s chosen the wrong business
is to let him try it. If it really is the wrong
thing you won’t have to argue with him to
quit, and if it isn’t you haven’t any
right to.
Speaking of
bull-pups that turned out to be terriers
naturally calls to mind the case of my old friend
Jeremiah Simpkins’ son. There isn’t a
solider man in the Boston leather trade than
Jeremiah, nor a bigger scamp that the law
can’t touch than his son Ezra. There
isn’t an ounce of real meanness in
Ezra’s whole body, but he’s just
naturally and unintentionally a maverick. When he
came out of college his father thought that a few
years’ experience in the hide department of
Graham & Co. would be a good thing for him
before he tackled the leather business. So I
wrote to send him on and I would give him a job,
supposing, of course, that I was getting a
yearling of the steady, old reliable Simpkins
strain.
I was a little
uneasy when Ezra reported, because he didn’t
just look as if he had had a call to leather. He
was a tall, spare New Englander, with one of
those knobby foreheads which has been pushed out
by the overcrowding of the brain, or bulged by
the thickening of the skull, according as you
like or dislike the man. His manners were easy or
familiar by the same standard. He told me right
at the start, while he didn’t know what he
wanted to do, he was dead sure that it
wasn’t the leather business. It seemed that
he had said the same thing to his father and that
the old man had answered, "Tut, tut,"
and told him to forget it and to learn hides.
Simpkins learned
all that he wanted to know about the packing
industry in thirty days, and I learned all that I
wanted to know about Ezra in the same time. Pork
packing seemed to be the only thing that he
wasn’t interested in. I got his resignation
one day just five minutes before the one which I
was having written out for him was ready; for I
will do Simpkins the justice to say that there
was nothing slow about him. He and his father
split up, temporarily, over it, and, of course,
it cost me the old man’s trade and
friendship. I want to say right here that the
easiest way in the world to make enemies is to
hire friends.
I lost sight of
Simpkins for a while, and then he turned up at
the office one morning as friendly and familiar
as ever. Said he was a reporter and wanted to
interview me on the December wheat deal. Of
course, I wouldn’t talk on that, but I gave
him a little fatherly advice - told him he would
sleep in a hall bedroom all his life if he
didn’t quit his foolishness and go back to
his father, though I didn’t really believe
it. He thanked me and went off and wrote a column
about what I might have said about December
wheat, and somehow gave the impression that I had
said it.
The next I heard
of Simpkins he was dead. The Associated Press
dispatches announced it, the Cuban Junta
confirmed it, and last of all, a long dispatch
from Simpkins himself detailed the circumstances
leading up to the "atrocity," as the
headlines in his paper called it.
I got a long wire
from Ezra’s father asking me to see the
managing editor and get at the facts for him. It
seemed that the paper had thought a heap of
Simpkins, and that he had been sent out to Cuba
as a correspondent, and stationed with the
Insurgent army. Simpkins in Cuba had evidently
lived up to the reputation of Simpkins in
Chicago. When there was any news he sent it, and
when there wasn’t he just made news and sent
that along.
The first word of
his death had come in his own letter, brought
across on a filibustering steamer and wired on
from Jacksonville. It told, with close attention
to detail - something he had learned since he
left me - how he had strayed away from the little
band of insurgents with which he had been out
scouting and had blundered into the Spanish
lines. He had been promptly made a prisoner, and,
despite his papers proving his American
citizenship, and the nature of his job, and the
red cross on his sleeve, he had been tried by
drumhead court martial and sentenced to be shot
at dawn. All this he had written out, and then,
that his account might be complete, he had gone
on and imagined his own execution. This was
written in a sort of pigeon, or perhaps you would
call it Spanish, English, and let on to be the
work of the eyewitness to whom Simpkins had
confided his letter. He had been the sentry over
the prisoner, and for a small bribe in hand and
the promise of a larger one from the paper, he
had turned his back on Simpkins while he wrote
out the story, and afterward had deserted and
carried it to the Cuban lines.
The account ended:
"Then, as the order to fire was given by the
lieutenant, Seņor Simpkins raised his eyes
toward Heaven and cried: ‘I protest in the
name of my American citizenship!’" At
the end of the letter, and not intended for
publication, was scrawled: "This is a bully
scoop for you, boys, but it’s pretty tough
on me. Good-by. Simpkins."
The managing
editor dashed a tear from his eye when he read
this to me, and gulped a little as he said:
"I can’t help it; he was such a d___d
thoughtful boy. Why, he even remembered to
inclose descriptions for the pictures!"
Simpkins’
last story covered the whole of the front page
and three columns of the second, and it just
naturally sold cords of papers. His editor
demanded that the State Department take it up,
though the Spaniards denied the execution or any
previous knowledge of any such person as this
Seņor Simpkins. That made another page in the
paper, of course, and then they got up a memorial
service, which was good for three columns. One of
those fellows that you can find in every office,
who goes around and makes the boys give up their
lunch money to buy flowers for the deceased aunt
of the cellar boss’ wife, managed to collect
twenty dollars among our clerks, and they sent a
floral notebook, with "Gone to Press,"
done in blue immortelles on the cover, as their
"tribute."
I put on a plug
hat and attended the service out of respect for
his father. But I had hardly got back to the
office before I received a wire from Jamaica,
reading" "Cable your correspondent here
let me have hundred. Notify father all hunk. Keep
it dark from others. Simpkins."
I kept it dark and
Ezra came back to life by easy stages and in such
a way as not to attract any special attention to
himself. He managed to get the impression around
that he’d been snatched from the jaws of
death by a rescue party at the last moment. The
last I heard of him he was in New York and
drawing ten thousand a year, which was more than
he could have worked up to in the leather
business in a century.
Fifty or a hundred
years ago, when there was good money in poetry, a
man with Simpkins’ imagination would
naturally have been a bard, as I believe they
used to call the top-notchers; and, once he was
turned loose to root for himself, he
instinctively smelled out the business where he
could use a little poetic license and made a hit
in it.
When a pup has
been born to point partridges there’s no use
trying to run a fox with him. I was a little
uncertain about you at first, but I guess the
Lord intended you to hunt with the pack. Get the
scent in your nostrils and keep your nose to the
ground, and don’t worry too much about the
end of the chase. The fun of the thing’s in
the run and not in the finish.
Your affectionate
father,
John Graham.
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