Rare Pancreatic Tumor Caused Woman to Act Drunk All the Time

If you saw your friend slurring his or her speech and having difficulty balancing, you might think alcohol was involved. And for friends of Rosemary McGinn, that's exactly what they pegged her disorderly behavior to. 

Yet McGinn, 53, believed her odd behavior was caused by her hypoglycemia, according to Fox News. To help keep blood sugar levels high, she would often carry around snacks in case of a sugar slump, according to a report from Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York.

However, following a checkup with Dr. Ronald Tamler, the clinical director of the Mount Sinai Diabetes Center, it was clear that McGinn's condition was much more serious that anyone thought.

"A normal blood sugar is around 100 milligrams/deciliter, and most people start feeling poorly when their sugar dips below 70," Tamler said, via the news organization. "But Rosemary had a sugar of 20. That level usually leads to seizures and coma."

She was soon after diagnosed with insulinoma, a rare pancreatic tumor that constantly makes insulin even when blood sugar is too low.

Friends, family and even coworkers had seen the symptoms of this undiagnosed problem throughout the past two years.

According to the Daily Mail, one episode in Spring 2011 in which McGinn became so greatly disoriented due to her incredibly low blood sugar had work colleagues actually believing that she was drunk, and McGinn was sent home. Shortly afterwards, as McGinn was driving with her husband, she could no longer remember where they lived.

Fortunately, after a successful 90-minute surgery at Mount Sinai, she no longer exhibits the old behaviors, and upon removing McGinn's tumor, it has been frozen and incorporated into the Mount Sinai Tissue Bank database for further study.