Wednesday, November 4, 2015

Self-Improvement=Torture, Day 3-4: Fugue State

There's this part in the outstanding television drama Breaking Bad where chemistry professor-turned-cancer patient/methamphetamine retailer Walter White (played by the Man, the Myth, the Legend, Bryan Cranston himself) disappears for a few days to start his meth business, and he needs an excuse to tell his family.

What does he do?

He shows up in a grocery store in the next town over, stark naked, and claims he suffered from a "fugue state."


I've never experienced this "fugue state," but I can tell you...

...last night sure felt like I did.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I struggled with sleep, especially in my high school days. I believe my doctor called it an "insulin imbalance" issue. You see, insulin normally works this way: You inject yourself with a specific number of units calculated by your current blood sugar level, what carbohydrates you're about to consume, and what exercise you have recently done; insulin has an onset time, a half life, a peaking time, and its end life (for example, the particular brand of insulin I take for meals takes about 30 minutes to kick in and it works on my blood sugar for about 4 hours), so there's a lot of calculations (*cough* guess work *cough*) involved.

But for some reason, no matter how excellent my blood sugar levels are before I go off to bed, and no matter what type of insulin I take, my blood sugar is always--ALWAYS--high the next morning. And usually, it's REALLY high.

So, naturally, sometimes when I'm trying to counter this phenomenon, I take too much insulin at night, and here comes the fugue state: my blood sugar goes so low that it wakes me up, sending one signal to my brain and one signal only:


I somehow bump my way through a dark house to the fridge, and then  
I begin to eat anything and everything.

We're told that when dealing with low blood sugar, you must eat or drink something with carbs AND THEN WAIT FIFTEEN MINUTES for it to get into your system. But that's. Fucking. Hard. Especially when you're in some kind of trance. I usually don't remember what I ate in these nighttime attacks until the next morning, and even then it's like putting the clues together in a murder mystery.

I swear, one time I actually ate a cold, uncooked hot dog out of the fridge. Which is ridiculous for three reasons.

1) Gross.
2) There aren't any carbohydrates in wiener dogs.
3) I had just eaten a cupcake. Talk about spoiling my dinner.

So anyway, that's what happened last night. That's why I only got about 4 hours of sleep.  
But I'm here, I'll persevere, and I'm gonna make today a success.

What kind of health challenges or sleeping challenges do you face? I'd love to hear about them.

To end, let me just say that NO, this is not what it felt like: (It was more like a witch cursed me to eat forever until I burst.)


No comments:

Post a Comment