By Bram Sable-Smith
Saturday Weekend Edition / NPR (9/1/18)
Diabetic ketoacidosis is a terrible way to die. It’s what happens when you don’t have enough insulin. Your blood sugar gets so high that your blood becomes highly acidic, your cells dehydrate and your body stops functioning.
Diabetic ketoacidosis is how Nicole Smith-Holt lost her son. Three days before his payday. Because he couldn’t afford his insulin.
“It shouldn’t have happened,” Smith-Holt says looking down at her son’s death certificate on her dining room table in Richfield, Minn. “That cause of death of diabetic ketoacidosis should have never happened.”
The price of insulin in the U.S. has more than doubled since 2012 alone. That’s put the life-saving hormone out of reach for some people with diabetes, like Smith-Holt’s son Alec Raeshawn Smith. It’s left others scrambling for solutions to afford the one thing they need to live. I’m one of those scrambling. …
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(Commoner Call photo by Mark L. Taylor, 2017. Open source and free to use with link to www.thecommonercall.org )