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.
