I hate needles.
I’ve hated needles ever since I was a very young girl, when my dad told me that the nurse was going to give me an injection, but not what an injection was or that it would hurt. (That having been said, vaccines save lives and my parents did the right thing to protect me from childhood diseases that used to fill the graveyards with their victims. A little pain is worth not dying.)
So for me one of the roughest things about being a type 2 diabetic is that I have to check my blood several times a day, and that I have to get blood work several times a year. For my own blood glucose checks I use the FastClix lancing device (as I wrote earlier). Before breakfast and before dinner, I wash my hands very thoroughly, then slip the test strip into my glucometer and jab the side of a finger with my FastClix, a process my husband and I refer to as “the scrub and stab,” or “the stub and scrab” if we’re feeling especially silly (which is often). Once I get a bead of blood, I touch the test strip to the blood, making sure that a sufficient sample is collected for the glucometer to analyze, then wait for the glucose reading. My glucometer offers what Trividia calls “event tagging,” meaning I can select an icon noting whether the reading was done before or after eating, exercising, if I’m sick, if I’ve just taken a a medication, or “other.” Most glucometers I’ve seen offer this feature, and I think it’s a good one, considering that all those factors can affect your blood sugar.
I didn’t like doing this at first, because I hate needles, but there’s not much of a choice when you need to monitor your blood sugar. While I look forward to advances in treating diabetes, I’m grateful to Dr. Banting and his research, which freed diabetics from living under a death sentence to living with a manageable disease. Diabetes still could shorten my lifespan, but I no longer have to worry about choosing between a starvation diet “cure” and falling into a diabetic coma.
This week I went to see my doctor for my twice-annual blood work. I am, as I warn every phlebotomist who sees me, a difficult stick. My veins like to roll. I usually advise them to break out two tourniquets so they can get a decent sample, though the really good ones manage it with a single tourniquet. After the samples are collected, I head home and wait for the e-mail notification that my results have been entered into the secure patient record website. The number I tend to care about the most is my hemoglobin A1c, which tells my doctor how well I’ve been managing my diabetes. I’m proud to say that I’ve kept it below 7 since I was discharged from the hospital in August 2016, which means I’m improving my odds of avoiding diabetic complications.
But I still hate needles. I’ve gotten used to the scrub and stab, and the blood work, but if we ever come up with a non-invasive way to monitor blood sugar–or better still, a cure for diabetes–then sign me up.
Rachel
I'm a writer, a knitter/spinner/weaver, a young stroke survivor, and a type 2 diabetic.
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