I don't think the doctors call us dummy patients.
Not these days, what with everything always being inappropriate.
But I am a dummy patient.
Every six weeks, a letter arrives from the hospital asking if I would be willing to be seen by fourth-year medical students.
Dummy patients are good for the students, they bring their textbooks to life.
And I am value for money because I bring a myriad of diabetes-related mishaps to the table.
I am in effect the all-you-can-eat buffet of dummy patients.
But I am also a dummy patient because, in managing my diabetes over 48 years, I have been, quite simply, a dummy.
And yet, blessed with the uncanny ability to remember and almost pronounce six-syllable drugs and diseases, I have been able to swan around the hospital like a veritable mustalid, dripping in snake-oil salesman charm.
The doctors down there are delighted to have me educating their young, they even leave me in the room alone.
My knowledge of diabetes, at least until I was 30, could barely cover the head of a pin.
Teenage diabetics think they are invincible, the doctors tell the students, and I nod supportively.
When the doctors leave the room, I tell the students of my own days as an invincible teenage diabetic, waking up hallucination-headed on strange beaches miles from town with neither medication nor food.
Or my quixotic belief during those years that if I gradually decreased my insulin, like a junkie exiting methadone, I would eventually be cured.
Diabetes is cured on the late news every three weeks, but not in this way.
These student sessions are held on Friday afternoons, when ennui can overpower the desire for knowledge, so vivid anecdotes of medical misbehaviour are just the thing to bring textbook chapters on diabetic complications to life.
I get up on the bed so they can try and find the kidney transplant.
An abdomen distended by 25,000 insulin injections often throws them off the track, and more than once I have been asked if I have a hernia or polycystic kidney disease.
What happens to the old kidney, they ask, eyes wide now, as if it is Monday morning.
They leave it in there, I reply, it shrinks to a raisin.
Students like to hear words like raisin when their lives are consumed by six-syllable drugs and diseases.
The last session for the year was two weeks ago.
The students have 15 minutes to find out all about me, so they open by asking why I am there.
Because I think I should break the ice, and also because I will always chase the cheap laugh, I usually tell them I am there for the $10 supermarket voucher Healthcare Otago have decreed I am worth.
Very few of the students laugh at this, which either suggests we are rearing a generation of humourless doctors, or these students are so consumed with acquiring knowledge they have no time for a third-rate Ronnie Corbett.
We can only hope it is the latter.
A good dummy patient can usually tell within five minutes which of the students are special, which ones will be unable to do your surgery in 20 years' time because they are at a conference in Switzerland.
It's manner as much as knowledge.
When you are lying in a hospital bed contemplating death, the doctor's manner is everything.
Doctors are trained to watch the patient's face when they examine; they should realise patients are watching their faces too.
The students are taught now to ask how the patient's lifestyle has been affected by their condition.
Hardly at all, I say airily, in fact I've learned more about life in hospital than anywhere, I wouldn't have changed a thing.
Afterwards I walk off to the supermarket in the next block, and, no longer invincible but still very much a dummy, spend my $10 voucher on marshmallows and ice cream.
Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
