School Daze

I am starting grad school in Health Systems Management in the fall (ideal career is nebulously defined as trying to do something to improve diabetes care and I hope I'll be able to get some clarity on that as I start my program.)

The program requires two pre-reqs and strongly recommends a third, so for the last six weeks I have been doing nothing but studying, taking exams and reading.  These classes are accelerated classes during the summer, so they will be over soon (thank god) but it's been a lot, cause did I mention these three classes are microeconomics, accounting and statistics? Oh, yeah.  F-u-N!

I was not a diabetic in college, didn't get the 'betes until I was 25..  (Which is a very good thing, considering my typical college weekend consisted of beer, pizza, waffles, beer, jungle juice, beer, pizza, bread sticks, beer, Gatorade, cereal and Gatorade.)  

I really had no idea what going back to school was going to be like, diabetes-management-wise.  Funnily enough, its easy to go right back to those eating habits I just described...with maybe not quite so much beer.... I've been in class so much that food shopping for fresh healthy food has gone by the wayside, and bagels, pizza, and big macs-with-no-meat are my new besties.  Not ideal, I know.

Last week, I had lunch with a friend near my school. We had sushi, which is definitely on the I list of "I love carbs but they don't love me" foods, but I eat it every once and a while and (thought) I had worked out a decent bolus.  For me, its actually one unit for every piece of sushi.  We ordered three rolls to split and had some edamame.  I bolused 9 units and only ate 7 pieces, so I thought I was good.  On the way to school, I must have immediately been feeling the carb-high-sluggish-brain coming on, because I wanted coffee but for some reason, ordered a cappuccino (way more carbs than I needed/wanted =high bg brain fog?) so 2 more units for that.

Now onto the homework and studying in the library before class.  Two hours of reading and homework later, I realized, I had not retained A (not one) thing. Fast forward to the next day, when I got the grade on the homework I turned in.  Not even half the questions right (Luckily, I've been doing well on all the other assignments.)  Ugh.  Its easy looking back, with a reasonable blood sugar brain, to see that I should have checked my bg sooner, and corrected it.  But when you're in the throes of high-blood-sugar-blood-is-as-thick-as molasses-and-is-clogging-my brain its not even easy to make the decision to test.  So lesson learned.  And, re-learned, as far as my homework goes. 



This is a normal brain...axon and dendride firing signals... you remember biology...making the brain work. (Picture courtesy of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synapse)

This is a brain after sushi (or other high carb food is consumed) axon and dendrite clearly unable to function normally.