Selfish Diabetic

Today when I woke up, I woke up with a headache. I cursed my decision to have chips last night as I was going to sleep. Too much glucose. Not enough insulin. I surveyed my skin and noticed I had developed those annoying lines you get from your bed sheets all over my arms. Peripheral edema. Yes. The hyperosmolarity of my blood would have caused an increased retention of fluid in my renal system. I checked my face in the mirror. Puffiness was present around my eyes, though perhaps that had occurred from not sleeping enough.

Fourteen minutes to class.

The oxidative stress of prolonged hyperglycemia on the body can cause diabetics to feel as though they need to sleep more. I have been taking an unnaturally large amount of Vitamin B throughout my medical school year. I do not know for sure if Vitamin B helps relieve oxidative stress--in fact, it very well might make it worse--but it's one of the things diabetics need to replenish according to Walgreens Pharmacies, so I take Vitamin B. I no longer always require eight hours of sleep, although sometimes...

Eight minutes to class.

Objects are falling into my backpack with little thought. Every day is more or less the same. One binder. One laptop. Always the same, though learning is always a little different. Finding my glucose meter, I decide to test. Sometimes I will be much higher than I think, will not take insulin, and spend the entire morning in the 200s. Glucose is 61?

So then what caused the edema? What caused the headache?

I think about my food intake at dinner as I guzzle some fruit snacks before leaving my apartment. Two minutes to class. What could my renal system have been doing while I slept? What about my endocrine system? What was my body doing that caused me to wake up the way I did? Exhausted? Edematous? But with a high core body temperature and a headache?

I wonder all these things and sometimes feel so close to drawing all the lines together and truly understanding how physiology interplays with biochemistry, then anatomy, and how all of these things affect my life. It is frustrating, but it is exciting--as if someone was carefully guiding me to enlightenment, nirvana, without my knowledge. Understanding why my body does the things it does will make me beyond happy. It will make me a fully realized human being.

This leaves me with a few thoughts: Why are there otherwise healthy people in medical school? And how can the few medical students I have met who confess they are only in this for the money... how can they study at all?