Rounding at the Hospital

Hey, everyone reading this!  I hope you had a great spring break, for those of you that go to my school.  I spent mine working.

It was awesome.

And by that I mean it was pretty interesting.  First of all, Dr. Walker, his medical students, and I have been working on rewriting that Wikipedia article on the Randle hypothesis that I linked to in my last post.  However, in order to do that, I've been reading a huge amount of scientific papers that deal with what Dr. Walker calls the "anti-Randle cycle," which is pretty much what I've been doing with him for the last few weeks.

Speaking of what I've been doing for the last few weeks, as I mentioned in my last post, I would talk about cheat days.  Basically, "cheat days" are occasional carb-loading days, where you can really have as many carbs as you want, after which you detox and enter into ketosis again.  I say "as many carbs as you want" because, although bread tastes really good after not having any for weeks, it's actually really difficult to overdo it.  Once you're keto-adapted, like I am right now, eating a bunch of bread or other carbs in one sitting actually makes you feel pretty gross.

I'm not gonna lie though--it still tastes delicious.

But the newest thing I really wanted to talk about, as you probably guessed from the title of this post, is the fact that I've started going on rounds in the hospital with the med students and Dr. Walker, which means that I'm actually seeing patients and learning about specific drugs and treatment options.  However, as an "observer," (seriously, it says that on my badge and everything.  Also, I have a badge!) I'm not allowed to talk to any of the patients, so I just kind of stand at the back awkwardly without saying anything.

Pictured: me

I've only been in twice so far, but it's been a really eye-opening experience.  Most of the people I've seen are those that are about to be discharged, so they've been pretty healthy-looking (despite having type 2 diabetes or "metabolic syndrome," which just means that they're insulin resistant).  It's basically pretty scary that a lot of the problems are, while not caused directly by insulin resistance, affected and made worse because of the worsened immune response caused by diabetes and metabolic syndrome.

And on that not-so-happy note, I'm going to end here.  I know this has been uncharacteristically short for this blog because I love rambling on for pages and pages, but I will continue this post in Part 2, where I will talk more about what I've been doing specifically, as well as some success stories I have seen and heard, while still sticking to HIPAA guidelines.

[Caption REDACTED by HIPAA]