For anyone who isn’t comfortable reading about needles, go away. This is not the post for you. I wish I were lucky enough to have that kind of choice, but like many people in the world, I can’t curate a bloodless, needle-less environment for myself.
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Today, as it seems I am so much of the time (thanks to having both juvenile diabetes and multiple sclerosis), I am in mourning for a part of myself.
At the behest of my regular eye doctor, I visited a new opthalmologist who specializes in diabetic patients, and I got pretty crappy news. It appears that I am, like most diabetics of all ilk, especially ones who’ve been diabetic for more than 25 years like me, losing my eyes. It seems that–more than likely–I will have to have injections in both eyes every six weeks… indefinitely.
I’m not sure that was entirely clear: every six weeks, this doctor wants to PUT A NEEDLE INTO MY EYE, with no end in sight (ha ha, get it?). And I have to make separate appointments for each eye, so that’s twice every six weeks of someone sticking a NEEDLE into my EYE.
I am certainly not a wimpy kid about needles. I have been a Type I (juvenile) diabetic most of my life, which means putting a catheter in the skin of my stomach (using a needle every 2 days and pricking my finger to draw blood about 8 times a day. Before I wore the pump, I had to give myself subcutaneous injections of insulin about 5 times a day. I also have MS, which has meant giving myself an injection in the thigh muscle every week and undergoing 10 hours of an IV treatment every month.
When I got the news about having diabetes, I started getting tattoos as a way to deal with it. I figured if I had to regularly stab myself with needles, I was going to use needles to make something aesthetically-positive come out of the experience. Now both my arms and my decoletage/collar bone are covered in tattoos. I’ve stopped getting them because I’m running out of space. The tattoos also prevent me from being a complaining baby when some doctor or other inevitably wants their Nurse Feratu to draw my blood or inject dye or some other pointy-stick-related barrier violation of me–you don’t get to complain about a needle prick when you’ve got visible tattoos.
All this needling has caused some damage: my veins are small to begin with, and now they’re getting scarred up and tough to use. It usually takes a phlebotomist or the IV nurse an average of 2-3 tries to find a usable vein. (Today, for instance, my arm looks like a yellow, red and purple mess where the opthalmologic nurse injected me with contrast dye and the vein blew.) The skin of my stomach is also getting scarred up enough that I may not be able to use the insulin pump there much longer either.
All this is to say I have become, over the years, The Human Pincushion, and I’m awful tired. Today I get the news that another person wants to start sticking needles into me–into my eyeballs, which is some of the only un-needled space left on me, and all I can think is how MORE tired I am.
I’m not using this space only to whinge, I promise. I’m just trying to figure out how to make sense of this, to make something of it that will do something in the world. I’m trying to figure out how to use this situation to make me a better person, more empathetic, stronger, braver. I remain well aware that many other folks suffer horribly much worse due to health or economics or politics or abuse or repression. But at the moment, all I can do is cry, worry about a medical mishap that will make it impossible to do the work I do now, or more medical bills (this will be more than $1500 per injection, I’m told–that’s $3000 every 5-6 weeks, and it’s unclear how much my insurance will cover), or just more pain and fear.
I mean, they want to put a dang NEEDLE in my dang EYE on a regular basis.
Life, this is the asshole-est joke you have ever played. Seriously. Not funny.
Alysia Constantine 