So here's a little story about...

So here's a little story about those times in life that you just have to laugh at yourself.  It was one of those amazingly mundane yet profound moments that nobody really realizes has this intense effect on you because it's just a part of their regular day.  Like I happen to know, for a fact that this moment held no weight or impact on either of the two other people that it involved.  If asked about it in a month they probably won't even remember it happened.  But for me it was one of those 'what the fuck am I doing here?!' kind of moments.  One of those moments you just have to laugh at yourself and say 'chill there girlfriend, you were kinda just taking things way to seriously there for a second'  then buy yourself some ice cream and call it a day.

So I'm in this dietetic internship right now, right.  And right now the majority of my day is spent doing the work that real dietitians don't want to do.  So whenever an A1C screen come through- A1C being a test that can indicate pretty well what someone's blood glucose has been running over 3 months, which is especially important for diabetics since it tells me that while you claim your blood sugar runs 'somewhere between 90 and 120' that really it's more like 190 and you're a lying asshole.  Anyway.  The hospital I'm working at screens; meaning we look through the patient lists for our floors and just browse for specific criteria for why we might go see a patient- we screen, for an A1C level of over 8%.  This means their average blood glucose level is ~183 which is much higher than the norm ~90 and your diabetes is getting out of control, you're going to lose the feeling in your fingers and toes... blah blah blah *dietitian talk*.  So anyway, we screen for these A1C tests and we have to go discuss with the patient why their blood sugars are running high and like 99% of the time it is because the person genuinely doesn't give a fuck.  Not to generalize the diabetic population; how undietitianlly of me. But at the very least my small. tiny. insignificant experience tells me that IF your A1C levels are running high, and have been for a while, you don't want to hear about carb counting and we're both going to sit here with smiles on our faces talking about things neither one of us wants to talk about.

Those are the kind of people I get to go see during this internship.

So I've got this patient.  And in an attempt to not break HIPPA we'll call them Daffy Duck.  Now Daffy Duck's condition I can't really describe either so let's just say that Daffy's principal problem is that someone ate his peanut butter.  Now along with someone eating his peanut butter Daffy also has dementia.  The doctors describe him as 'pleasantly demented' but he has it never the less.  So I'm in Daffy's room and my plan is to go through my typical laundry list of things I talk to patients about, bowel movements, nausea/vomiting, how you eat a home...the good stuff.  So I'm talking to Daffy and first question in he starts going off.  He's going off about how scary someone stealing his peanut butter is and how he doesn't want to be in the hospital because it scares him and how they got his diagnosis wrong and really they just THINK someone stole his peanut butter but really it's just someone playing a prank on him and they just hid it under his bed.  And so on and so on in a sort of gibberish, demented, smile and nod along sort of way.  But still I'm starting to feel Daffy's emotions and starting to connect with him when I realize I haven't asked any of my questions!.... So I panic.  I decided I have to interrupt Daffy.  I really didn't want to do this but it was getting to be to long, out of my scope of practice and I did have other patient's lives to save.  So I do it. I interrupt Daffy right smack dab in the middle of this really heavy conversation.  And I ask. I ask, in my grown up *loud and slow* so the patient can understand properly voice,  I ask, "SO HAVE YOUR BOWELS BEEN MOVING ALRIGHT RECENTLY??"