Shoot Up or Put Up

I had my swine flu jab on Saturday (affectionately known round here as the pig poke!).

I wasn’t planning to write about it as I didn’t think I’d have anything more to say than Tim’s wildy entertaining piece had already covered.  

Sadly the English experience hasn’t been quite as good as the Scottish one this time round. I spent a thoroughly tedious 90 minutes sitting with hundreds of other people on Saturday morning as a group of very stressed looking NHS staff herded us through the system to be poked.

While I’m in awe of the NHS finally recognising that I have a job and that delivering healthcare on a Saturday is a great idea, I do question the benefit of it in this case when I was pretty much the only person in the building young enough to have a job.

After a perfectly painless poke I was unable to resist rebelling against the system and scandalously skipped my 10 minutes “recovery time”. I felt I’d probably contracted enough germs already, without sitting in an over heated room for ten more minutes listening to people whinge about how much they hate injections.

I read on the interweb that some bloke called Tim in Scotland had his jab and it had no effect on his diabetes. This proves that everything you read on the interweb is rubbish. Six hours after my jab I headed skywards and stayed there for 24 hours before starting to decline. Now the diabetes is back at normal levels but my arm is killing me. Apart from that, I’m remarkably unscathed.

So, what do we learn from this tale? Don’t believe everything you read on the interweb and if you want a pump, come to north west England, if you want a speedily efficient swine flu jab, Edinburgh is the place to be.

Unprocessed bacon sandwiches, yesterday

For those that care (and I know you’re few and far between) I had my swine ‘flu jab last night. It was as much fun as any vaccine injection I’ve had before and I now have a mildly aching arm this morning. But that’s as far as the side effects go. Oink! Again I was impressed with how well organised my local surgery was – in and out in three minutes. So compared to the utter misery of actually getting ‘flu a slightly sore arm and a few minutes of my time is a tiny price to pay.

That vaccines can be created so quickly and dealt out so efficiently is of great comfort in the, perhaps unlikely (but not impossible) event of worldwide zombie infestation. I think you’ll agree that all of us have wondered at some point what would happen in the event of the undead rising up from their foetid graves and roaming the earth trying to sate their hunger for spicy brains. Currently the only known cure for the infected is, of course, to remove the head or destroy the brain – with a cricket bat, fire-axe, lawnmower or any other blunt instrument that comes to hand.

One would hope that should such an outbreak occur the nation’s best scientists (presuming that they themselves hadn’t been bitten, infected and transformed into one of the untold legions of undead) would be able to come up with a vaccine pretty quickly and my local surgery would be efficiently dolling out the cure to the local populace within a month or so of the first cases being reported.

We all know that diabetes is, to be honest, a bit of pain. But compared to zombification and brainlessly lurching after humans with a view to consuming their living flesh (do you get vegetarian zombies I wonder?) we diabetics have it easy. I think this important point should have been a major feature of World Diabetes Day – I suppose there’s always next year…

Swine flu - these guys started it!

Later today, you’ll be thrilled to hear, I’m off to the doctors to go and get my swine flu jab. I mentioned in my earlier post about seasonal flu that last year I did manage to successfully contract flu (proper flu I mean, not “man flu”; no, honestly) and I vowed never to miss a vaccination again. The sweats, weakness, aching, misery, despond and despair caused by flu were just far too horrible to contemplate ever having again.

So I’m therefore looking forward to an injection given by someone else for once (ohh, luxury!) and a slightly aching arm. This is clearly more than fair recompense from protection from the oinking disease.

When I was a small child, many, many years ago I would occasionally have philosophical moments (well, as much as a seven year old can have philosophical moments) and wonder what the future would be like. Say in 2009. Hovercars would be pretty cool, entire meals in a pill would be great but, even then, I thought the traditional silver space suit would be perhaps a little impractical and perhaps somewhat dull.

Sadly, none of the things I imagined have come to fruition – we don’t holiday on the moon or travel through time like Doctor Who (which is probably a good thing, given the scrapes that can result from inadvertently opening worm holes in fourth dimensional black holes and messing with the space-time continuum (apparently)). So maybe we’re just living in a stagnant technological backwater of the early 21st century with little to show for the last 25 years.

Then I thought about swine flu for a moment. Back in April swine flu was a brand new strain of influenza that hadn’t been seen before. Now, by November, that new strain has been isolated, genetically sequenced, a vaccine has been engineered, thoroughly tested and is available in my local surgery. When I think for a moment about that I’m utterly amazed. That vaccinations can be made available to the public within 6 months of them turning up on the virus-scene is utterly flabbergasting.

Similarly with diabetes, in merely 90 years we’ve moved from the single option of slow, unpleasant death (never ideal) to having a choice of a whole range of artificially engineered insulins which work extremely well and give us pancreatically-challenged hoards pretty much a normal life. Similarly blood testing equipment and other accessories having moved on massively in recent years – tiny blood samples, three second results and so on. It’s genuinely amazing.

We might not live on the moon, like I imagined at 7, but – by crikey- when you think about it for a minute we’re living in the future right now. Cool!

You'll just feel a little scratch

Well it’s that time of year again, the time of year when I usually ignore my letter from my doctor reminding me to go and get my winter ‘flu jab.

But not this year, oh no. No, this year I’ll definitely be subjecting myself to the joys of a slightly achy arm for the day. I’m not particularly worried about swine ‘flu (oink), as from what I can see it doesn’t seem to be much worse than usual seasonal ‘flu. I suspect it’s been, perhaps, blown a little out of proportion. After all the British press absolutely loves a health scare – especially rancid rag The Daily Mail, which seems to be made up of little else. If I’m wrong, however, please feel free to crow over my cooling corpse saying “we told you so…”

Anyway, I’m just terrified of the usual plain old common or garden ‘flu. Why? Because last year I actually got it and I have to say that it was far from being a week-long chucklefest. I picked it up at a family birthday in France from my brother – yeah, thanks Ben – and on the return trip spent a merry afternoon in Gatwick airport waiting for connecting flight  steadily feeling more and more awful (and, coincidently, probably passing on said ‘flu to 30,000 passers-by who were flying to every corner of the world – go me!)

The next five days or so were spent in bed, sweating, shaking, coughing, spluttering, checking my BG every hour, injecting extra insulin and generally wishing I was dead. Everything hurt and I could hardly summon the mental energy to get up and do something as simple as visit the bathroom (I did eventually go, you’ll be pleased to hear). It was the second most miserable five day period I’ve ever had. The first most miserable was the last time I had ‘flu – at boarding school in Northern Ireland. What fun that was!

So, never wishing to experience the misery of proper ‘flu again (man flu’s fine – I can deal with / put that on any day) I’m ignoring the inevitable health scares concerning vaccines and I’ll be at my doctor’s next Saturday at the front of the queue for the jab.

I have to confess that despite all that, I probably would have ignored the doctor’s reminder as usual. But after consistently disregarding her advice to “go and get your bloody ‘flu jab” last year, Katie very sensibly just made an appointment for me yesterday. I have been told.

We’re all sensible people here. Well, most of us are.

By that I mean that we all know how we’re supposed to behave as good diabetics. We know that if we’re on MDI we should use a new needle each time we inject and we should rotate our injection sites. If we’re on a pump we should change the cannula every three days.

All of us, regardless of insulin therapy method, should use a new lancet each time we finger prick to test our blood glucose. Which, of course, we do regularly (remembering to throw in the occasional random check to make sure there’s nothing untoward that we’ve missed).

We also know that sharps should be collected and disposed of properly – bloody used needles shouldn’t chucked in the office paper recycling bin because we can’t be bothered taking them home.

We all know this stuff; but, and be honest now, how often do we find ourselves slipping into bad habits? Being late to the party I’ve only been a member of the diabetic club for four years and I’ve noticed more and more that I just can’t be arsed changing my needles all the time and putting a new lancet in just seems a bit too much like hard work.

However, I’ve noticed a pattern and for your benefit I’ve plotted this over time using the hugely scientific method of rough guesswork:

Scientifically generated graph of bad habits over time

As you can see, plotted over time, bad habits do gradually get more frequent; but this is then offset by occasional bouts of guilt. These are brought on by any number of sources – a concerned wife asking about sore-looking eyelids (always a sign of bad BG control with me); a couple of days feeling rough, or just a revitalised determination to manage things well and be top of the class at the next trip to the clinic.

I suppose as long as the bad habits don’t drop beneath a certain level things will be fine. But I wonder if this pattern continues indefinitely – until we get so bad we’re using rusty, three month old needles to inject into our eye as we can’t be bothered moving off the sofa to inject in our blubbery, overweight stomach. I don’t know, maybe some of you old hands can comment.

Shooting up in public always seems to be a controversial and emotive topic. This was highlighted recently by the letters page of this month’s Diabetes UK magazine Balance, which was crammed with missives about the pro and cons of injecting in public.

I’m not exactly shy and retiring and I’ll happily shoot up in front of all and sundry. My family and friends are very used to it and if anyone new is around I will ask if they have a wild needle-phobia that might result in panic-attacks, vomiting and fatal collapse before whipping out the old humalog.

Some people seem to think that shooting up in public is distasteful and off-putting. I think, however, that squirting insulin into your body is something natural and therefore best done out there, externally and in public. I think that non-diabetics whose working pancreases squirt away furtively and secretly, hidden away behind their stomachs are ever so slightly sinister. What are they hiding from us and why do they have to keep things concealed like some Austrian father?

Anyway, sneaking away to the kludgy (Scots = toilet; for example “hey pal, will youse keep an eye on ma pint o’ heavy – am off tae the kludgy for a pish”) when in a fancy restaurant or whatever just makes you look like an extra from some terrible druggie film, so my view is shoot up whenever and wherever. If our pancreatically-advantaged friends don’t like it, they can lump it. Just because their organs are all present and correct doesn’t mean they can rub our collective faces in it.

My view has of course led to shooting up in a few interesting places. Possible the most public was the opening ceremony of the Tour de France, which was held in Trafalgar Square in the centre of London a few years ago. (Yes, I know it’s odd that a race around France started in London; but that’s the French for you).

Anyway, we had a pleasant afternoon watching top cyclists, only slightly marred by the irritating guy next to us who kept shoving us to get a better view and making stupid comments. Bah! However, despite these interruptions the clock soon clicked round to 7.30pm and the approximate time I shove in 40u of lantus. So I whipped out the kit, inserted a needle, up went the souvenir Tour de France t-shirt and in went the oh-so-sweet life-giving insulin.

I looked up to see the annoying chap had gone white, was backing slowly away while looking – with fear in his eyes – at my friends for help or support, who looked back blankly as they’d, of course, seen it all before. The lack of reaction from my chums just increased his fear. Had he inadvertently stumbled into some hideous drugs-posse who were going to kidnap him, get him addicted to hard drugs, ship him in a container lorry to Eastern Europe and then pimp him out to tattooed Baltic sailors as a white, male go-go girl?

I have to confess that this actually was our plan, but sadly he made good his escape and disappeared into the crowd.

I daresay you can all add your, infinitely better, stories of shooting up in public in the comments below. So I’ll end with a list of places in which I plan to shoot up in the next year:

•    At the top of the Chrysler Building in New York
•    In a hot air balloon over the Cotswolds
•    While scuba-diving around a rusting, sunken German U-boat in the Scarpa Flow
•    Bareback on a rodeo stallion in Texas
•    In front of the Queen

P.S., by the way cycling freaks might be interested in Team TypeOne – a professional cycling team, all of whom have Type One. Lucky them.