If you’re interested in the Presenting To The Emergency Room mug, or other Chubbyemu merch,
link to my store is in the description below.
Hello. Doctor Bernard here. I recently made a video on Chubbyemu about someone who chugged
12 energy drinks in 10 minutes. I remember this guy coming through the emergency room, and
no one knew that he chugged all those energy drinks, until he told everyone much later.
The pancreatitis was pretty straightforward to pick out. Severe abdominal pain radiating to
the back, with nausea and vomiting, and just the most insanely elevated serum lipase level. The
vast majority of acute pancreatitis comes from gall stones, alcohol, or high triglycerides,
lotta times in the setting of diabetes. The patient didn’t have any of those,
although he was pre diabetic. There’s not that many people chugging huge amounts of energy
drinks all the time to give us the same data that we have for alcoholics and diabetics when
it comes to pancreatitis. But it does appear there could be association with excess energy
drink consumption and pancreatitis, which I may have experienced myself.
When the patient in the Chubbyemu video came through, it reminded me of a time in my life,
10 years earlier from that point, where I chugged 6 energy drinks in 15 minutes. And
while I was making the Chubbyemu video, it reminded me of a different time, after JS
presented to the emergency room, when energy drinks cured my insomnia. If you were watching
Chubbyemu back then, you were witness to this happening, even if you probably didn’t know it.
When I was 16, I was working my first job washing dishes at a restaurant. I remember
the chef paid me less than minimum wage. And his rationale for that was he wanted me to become a
culinary person. You know you work your way up from dish washer to bus boy to something
in between all the way up to line cook and so on. This was a very small restaurant,
they only opened on the weekends. The place sat like 12 people. It was like a couple hundred
bucks per person for a 5 course meal, and this was like 20 years ago, it was a lot of money.
But restaurant working culture today, is probably not very different from back then. You see,
the actual line cooks were like 20 something year old guys. And they thought it would be
funny if they challenged me. “Bernard, we got 6 cans of this energy drink. And
tonight’s gonna be a really busy night, some tables are actually double booked,
it’s gonna be a fire hazard in the dining area, and it’s gonna be an absolute fire
hazard for you washing dishes. We need you to go double time, and you know what,
we’ll give you 25 bucks for your trouble, you gotta finish all 6 of these cans in 15 minutes.”
And, being 16, thinking it was funny. I did it. It was awful. I could feel my heart beating in my
neck. And I almost just throw up in the sink every 5 minutes. I had to grip the dishwasher handle and
squeeze as hard as I could so I wouldn’t just empty out my guts everywhere. They thought it
was funny. Apparently the chef got pissed when he found out what had happened because my skin was
pale gray, he almost sent me home. He did a load of dishes on his own in-between reservations. But
for me, I was in a world of hurt. I did have abdominal pain radiate to my back, so who knows,
maybe that night, I had acute pancreatitis from those energy drinks. Mild cases self resolve,
so who knows. I didn’t sleep that night either, cause I was too wired from the caffeine.
Basically, after that night, I didn’t touch any energy drink for like 10 years. There
was a short stint where I had like a can a day because I could buy the big 24 case from Costco,
but I stopped that pretty quick, actually, because of patient JS. His situation basically brought
back all the restaurant memories, and I just never bought another Costco case afterwards.
Now fast forward to 2017. I had been on YouTube for about 2 years at that point.
In the beginning of that year, I did a fat loss vlog, I lost around 40 pounds. And I kept it off.
I take personal videos where I talk about daily things happening in my life, and looking back
at my own records, I describe how I ate at that time. What I had for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
What I didn’t realize was happening at the time, but I can see now watching back to those videos,
is that the amount I was eating gradually became less and less as 2017 went on. I didn’t just
stop at the 40 pounds weight loss, I kept going. You can kinda see it in the medical videos that
were made that year. I stopped doing cardio, but I also just didn’t eat as much, because
I just didn’t want to. It wasn’t even really a conscious effort, I just didn’t eat a lot.
And this really became a problem on the day October 12, 2017. That day,
I had a meeting at the National Institutes of Health here in DC. I had a colleague from Germany,
who had flown in the day before who was going to join me at this meeting. Like, I had to be there,
no matter what. I remember I had to get up at like 5am for this meeting, so the night before
I went to bed early. But no matter what I did, I couldn’t fall asleep. I was tossing and turning.
I turned on the fan because I thought my legs were too warm. I moved to the other side of my bed
because I thought the side I was sleeping on was too warm, but nothing would work. I thought I
was sweating so I went and took a cold shower to the point where I was shivering. But that
shivering made my body even warmer. I opened up a book to try to read myself to sleep, but 3 am
rolled around and my eyes were wide open. Nothing was happening. At 5 am, I got out of bed and I
watched the sun rise. My mind was mush for that meeting. I don’t remember anything about it.
The problem is, this wasn’t a one off. The next night, I still couldn’t fall asleep. Now,
I had to be on call and do overnights a lot at one point of my life, but like usually I’ll have some
kind of nap or something to just cover for that time awake. But it didn’t happen the next day
on October 13. And the 14th. And the 15th. I could just feel my body wither away, my
heart felt like it was just flapping in my chest, because I had been up for so many days straight.
I think what finally put me to sleep, even if just for a few hours was the fact that I ate
a few pieces of chicken and then took a nap in my office chair. It went on like this for
more than a year. Originally I thought it was stress. Chubbyemu was breaking out in a way I
had never seen in the 2 years prior on YouTube. I had a video front page, to the top of Reddit,
and there was this constant buzzing at the back of my head about making a better video than my last.
I remember some time that fall in 2017, I went to a Center for Sleep Disorders here in DC because I
couldn’t take it anymore. I talked to the fellow who was finishing up his program in neurology,
and we were trying to hypothesize what the problem could be. Sometimes in Chubbyemu videos,
I’ve made fun of suggesting cognitive behavioral therapy, in times when it’s not appropriate.
And that comes from this encounter with the neurology fellow. Because that was what he
suggested. In fact, he was convinced that was the only thing that was going to help.
Now this is where I become the problem patient, because I know in my life,
nothing about my behavior had changed. The routine in my life by that time, had largely
been the same for about 5 years. CBT wasn’t going to do jack shit.
I’ll be honest, in my entire life, I have never experienced
that level of insomnia. And when you have something like that, you just become stressed
when night falls. Because you know you’re going to be miserable and frustrated and angry that
you won’t be able to fall asleep. And the dread of knowing that you will lay in bed, eyes wide open,
and you will see the sun rise in the same way you saw the sun set 12 hours earlier,
drains you in a way that I never want to experience ever again in my life.
And throughout all this frustration and dread and stress for months of not being able to sleep,
and then not being able to function the next day because I couldn’t sleep,
I finally just cracked. I remember going to buy groceries one night and seeing the 4
pack of monster energy drink. And I thought, you know what? I’m just gonna drink one for dinner.
It’s not like im gonna sleep anyways, so might as well drink one as a screw you to my body.
That way at least I can sit up at my computer to write the next video. And so actually that night,
I remember drinking 2 of those cans. And lo and behold, I didn’t fall asleep that night.
But, what I did do, was fall asleep in the day time the next day. And it wasn’t just
a little nap. It was full on like 6 hours, I was completely knocked out, to the point
I couldn’t remember that I had fallen asleep so I woke up confused. That was the first time I
actually slept decently since October 11th 2017. I didnt really know what had happened, so at night
time again, I had another can of Monster because I expected that I’d stay up and watch the sun rise.
Now, here’s the part that confused me. The Walmart here in DC where I did my grocery shopping ran
out of the sugar free monsters, so I just stopped having the energy drinks for like a month.
Within a couple of weeks, my insomnia came back. When the stock of energy drink came back,
I started drinking them again, and I could sleep again. This made no sense to me at all. Because
energy drinks are what college kids use to pull all-nighters and stuff like that.
You’re wired when you drink them, that’s the point. Falling asleep after you drink one,
shouldn’t be happening, but it was happening to me. None of it made any sense.
Until, I looked at the nutrition facts, and then, it all started to click. You see,
B vitamins are something you can become deficient in pretty quickly if your diet keeps becoming more
and more scarce, especially in animal proteins, like mine did. Vegans know this very well,
because at least in the past, they needed to make sure they supplemented with Vitamin B12.
One of the big reasons why I was able to slim down so quickly was that I drastically cut out
my protein intake. I realized I miscalculated the protein content of chicken in March of 2017,
so I swung the pendulum the other way and under consumed, by a lot. And you
often seen on these energy drinks that B vitamins are a way to supply more energy
for you. That’s a weird marketing tactic, because B vitamins do help with ATP pathways,
which are for cell energy, but you’re not going to feel more perked up because of B vitamins.
Severe B12 deficiency does cause neurologic problems. It’s called subacute combined
degeneration. This includes things like psychosis and blindness in extreme cases. I’ve described
these on Chubbyemu. I’ve seen these before with my own eyes, but it didnt click in my head that it
was happening to me. At the time I was figuring this out, I ordered a blood test for myself,
I did have really low methylmalonic acid and homocysteine levels, which are Vitamin B12
deficiency. Direct vitamin B12 levels you can do but the assays have high rates of false negatives,
false positives and individual variability, so you get the intermediates instead.
So there it is. I had developed a vitamin B12 deficiency because of my self imposed dietary
restrictions in 2017. From those restrictions, I probably depleted my liver’s stores of vitamin
B12, and humans don’t make B12 on their own. And as a “screw you” to my own body,
I started drinking energy drinks at night, which happen to be rich in Vitamin B12,
and accidentally cured my own insomnia that way. It’s funny how even having this knowledge,
and having the clinical know how and experience of treating the deficiency, it hits different when
it is happening to you. If you don’t have a B12 deficiency, which you probably don’t in
the way that I did at least, this worked for my freak accident situation. I now
supplement my B12 with a multivitamin, and I dont drink any energy drinks currently.
If you want more of an explainer on vitamin B12, I talk about it on Chubbyemu in the video about
the boy who ate only chips and French fries for 10 years, and with the mom who ate 5 day old sushi,
links in the description below. Thanks for watching. Take care of yourself. And be well.