A giant basket of chocolates arrived Wednesday at the Lawrence Police Department. It was a gift for officers and dispatchers who helped rescue a woman from a diabetic attack during Tuesday night’s winter storm.

Kansas University senior Stephanie Bowlin, 22, was driving to her boyfriend’s house in east Lawrence about 5:30 p.m. Tuesday when she took a wrong turn. A diabetic, Bowlin had just taken the insulin her body needs, but it had reacted too quickly — causing her blood-sugar level to drop dramatically.

A sufficient supply of oxygen was not reaching her brain. When that happens, the first symptoms are that she grows impatient and disoriented.

“You could tell me that my bunny wants to talk to me, and I’ll say, ‘OK,'” Bowlin said Wednesday.

Under those conditions, she unwittingly had driven onto the Haskell Indian Nations University campus. She drove in circles for a while, then pulled over and called her boyfriend, KU medical student Andy Pope.

Pope began asking Bowlin questions to try to find out where she was, but Bowlin grew frustrated, hung up on Pope and turned off the car.

Bowlin was sweating, so, as temperatures plummeted and sleet started to fall, she took off both jackets she was wearing. She rummaged around in the car for juice or food but couldn’t find anything.

“From then on out, I don’t know what happened to me,” she said.

But Pope called the police. He also called Bowlin’s mother, Marcheta Bowlin, who drove 85 mph to Lawrence from her home in Olathe and went to a dispatch room at the Judicial & Law Enforcement Center, 111 E. 11th St.

Stephanie Bowlin was rescued by a police officer shortly before slipping into a diabetic coma. She was disoriented from her attack, which happened during Tuesday's ice storm. Police found her at Haskell Indian Nations University.

Dispatchers called Stephanie Bowlin’s cell phone. She answered, but didn’t speak coherently, and at one point dispatchers could only hear her breathing on the other end.

Police called her wireless-phone provider, Verizon, but learned only that her phone’s signal was coming from a tower in Kansas City. Marcheta Bowlin knew that if her daughter was left without aid for too long, she would slip into a diabetic coma.

“With this pending storm, I thought for sure that I’d lost her,” Marcheta Bowlin said. Wednesday. “At that point, all we could do was rely on the Police Department to find her.”

The department breaks the city down into 10 districts, with one officer assigned to patrol each district per shift. An on-duty supervisor directed those officers to search their districts for Bowlin’s 2004 Toyota Solara.

About 6:50 p.m. — more than an hour after the initial call came in — officer Kresten Spurling spotted the car at the southeast corner of the Haskell campus near a cemetery entrance, said Sgt. Mike Pattrick, a police spokesman.

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Bowlin received treatment at Lawrence Memorial Hospital, and by Wednesday had fully recovered from the ordeal. Later Wednesday, she and her mother went to Russell Stover Candies, 1300 W. 23rd St., and bought an assortment of chocolates and other sweets to take to the Police Department.

“We got them a little chocolate medal and wrote on there with frosting “Thanks for caring,'” Marcheta Bowlin said. “Their world stopped last night and they looked for my daughter.”