So I learned recently (because I never looked it up or remembered before now) that you are a med student, then an intern, then a resident, then a fellow. I’m sure there are a few more (HA!) steps involved, but super basically that’s it.
This means that the fellow I saw last week at my doctor’s office has had at least 7 med-school years behind her. And I must say that if she wants to work with patients with type one diabetes she probably should spend some more time learning before she goes one-on-one with a patient with type one. She seemed like she had a lot to learn, despite knowing a lot of the calculations and science behind my pump readouts.
As we all know, it’s a lot to learn. A LOT. I’m sure for a physician it’s even more to learn than the rest of us!
(That doesn’t sound very fair, and that’s not how I intended that to sound: I don’t have any particular issue with her— but I was glad she isn’t my doctor.)
For one thing, the fellow kept looking at my doctor for answers to her questions about my diabetes instead of looking and listening to ME.
Yes, I am the rock star in the room at my own visit!
Which was fine; she hadn’t ever met me before and she was there working to learn from my doctor. And, my doctor knows a lot about type one diabetes.
But then the two doctors started discussing my sensor. Saying things like “a representative told me it didn’t work very well with pressure” that they thought would be a help for me to learn. At that moment it really hit me like a ton of bricks in a crystallized vision I hadn’t seen with such clarity in a while.
They don’t understand what it’s like to live with diabetes.
Really, truly, LIVE in the mundane, somewhat silly yet important ways that teach us something with every experience, every day.
Most of us with a sensor who has worn it on their hip and fallen asleep at 200 and woken 30 minutes later to a false “low” alarm knows that it doesn’t work when you’re sleeping directly on your sensor. Any of us who have worn it underneath tights or (gah!) nylons and have been alerted to a false low can tell you: the sensors don’t like pressure. (It makes sense, given that the sensor uses measurements from your interstitial fluid, that if your circulation of interstitial fluid is impeded by your body weight or by compressing clothing, that the sensor won’t work as it was designed.)
So the fact that neither of these women had worn a sensor for 3 days (ever, I imagine) seemed off to me. If I was a physician and I could try something that might give me an insight into my patients’ daily life with their disease, I would like to think I’d try it out.
Then again, what’s the point of wearing a sensor if your pancreas works? They wouldn’t ever get an alarm, much less any of the 13 I got between 9:30pm and 5:00am last night.
Maybe it’s that I want to think my doctors WANT to know what it’s like to live with diabetes… which is kind of strange, as I tend to think I’d never wish diabetes on anyone.
As we all know, life with diabetes takes a heck of a lot of knowledge and everyday teensy things that end up teaching us more and more.
No matter how many years of school and training they put in, it’s beyond me why we consider our doctors the “experts” in diabetes. Sure, they know a heck of a lot and are incredibly skilled and talented in their own right… but I have to consider myself the expert when it comes to my diabetes.
23 years of daily life is longer than any formal medical education, anyway.
