Day 3 - Memories
As soon as I came off IV insulin, I was presented with an insulin pen and an option. The one wonderful nurse who worked on that ward, whose name I can never remember (I think it might have been Heather, but she's always been Anna in my mind, because she reminded me so strongly of someone else) said I could inject myself, or she could do it for me until I felt like I wanted to myself.
I didn't want to do it. Of course I didn't - it's a sharp pointy thing - the sort of thing that generally we're told not to go at ourselves with. Who actually wants to stick needles in themselves? No-one I've come across. I didn't think I was ever going to want to do it, so it seemed as good a time as any. I was 24, I was supposedly an adult, I could handle this. Of course I could.
And I did. I injected into my arm. I had been given the induction of all the places you could realistically inject, but the very thought of injecting anywhere but my arm made my insides churn.
A couple of days later, I was sat on the floor of my living room with the pen in my hand again. Trying to force myself to inject in my stomach. I don't know why I was so hung up on making myself do it. Maybe I was trying to break through a mental block, I can't be sure. What I do know was that it must have been gone 20 minutes before I actually got the nerve together to do it. Time when I remembered that this first solo flight was only the beginning of everything. That it wasn't going to end, that I wasn't going to wake up and find it was all a bad dream.
Perhaps it was a way of taking control. But the memory of that moment is still very clear to me. The funny thing is that I routinely injected in my stomach until I switched to pumping. I only ever injected in my arms if I was wearing a dress and couldn't easily inject in my thigh. Even now I'm pumping, I never put my site anywhere other than my stomach. I'll have been pumping for 3 years in November, and not one non-stomach site. Another mental block? I don't know. Maybe I just need to push through this one as well, but I'm not sure how to go about it. But if I can kick through it, maybe that can be the memory I look back on for another Diabetes Blog Week in a couple of years...
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D-Blog Week - Day 3 - Flying Solo
Wednesday 22 May 2013
| Labels: dblog week, getting philosophical |
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