By Phil McCausland and Suzanne Ciechalski
“I can’t afford to go to the ER. I can’t afford anything. I just went to bed and hoped I’d wake up,” Mallory Lorge said about her blood sugar going high.
Mallory Lorge, who suffers from Type 1 diabetes, is forced to ration her insulin and look at her possessions to decide what she can sell to pay down her bills because she isn’t receiving a paycheck during the record-long government shutdown.
Lorge, who lives in the small town of River Falls, Wisconsin, said she has two vials of insulin left in her fridge, but she is rationing them because she can no longer afford the $300 copay.
Her blood sugar rose to a high level last week, but she said she felt forced to ignore it. Instead, she went to bed.
“When it gets that high you can go into diabetic ketoacidosis, you can go into a coma,” she said. “I can’t afford to go to the ER. I can’t afford anything. I just went to bed and hoped I’d wake up.”
