Urged by a close friend, I recently donated a pint of blood at the local Red Cross center. Urged is the wrong word. He shamed me into it.
Honest, it’s not that I don’t like helping out—I just can’t stand getting poked, and despite being dependent on insulin for the last three years, I remain afraid of sharps.
Unfortunately, they are a big part of my life now. There are the lancets I use to prick my fingers and forearms, and the needles I use to inject 40 units of slow-acting insulin into my stomach every night. There’s my Byetta pen, which I stick into the fat around my navel before breakfast and dinner. And there are the blades and large sticks the nurses at my physicians’ offices use to extract blood by the tubeful.
As a child, I faced my share of penicillin needles: I contracted strep throat 26 times between age 4 and 12. When I see a needle of any size today, I conjure the memory of high-gauge steel and viscous medicine, which produced a powerful blend of pains both sharp and dull.
I realize I’m a wimp, but my phobia of needles is quite real. My
doctor, having been in the room when a nurse was trying to extract
blood from my arm, has long been sympathetic to my plight as a
sharps-phobe. He helped me avoid adding insulin to my regimen for
several years—until I could no longer manage the disease on oral meds
alone.
Then he wrote me a prescription for slow-acting insulin and sent me to a nurse educator for training. She patiently walked me through my new regimen. She demonstrated a "stick" on a orange foam ball, then handed me the needle and asked me to give it a try. I reached for the ball. This would be easy.
"No, Sean. You need to stick it into your stomach."
"Do what?"
"You’re a big boy, aren’t you?"
I waited for the nurse educator to add something about a post-injection treat, but no offer was forthcoming. After applying an alcohol swab, I gritted my teeth, sucked air into my lungs, looked away, and pushed the shiny needle into a pinched piece of belly.
"Well done," she said.
I looked down to confirm the needle was in. I hadn’t felt a thing.
In dealing with this chronic illness, I have been afraid of many things: neuropathy, dialysis, blindness, short life expectancy—all things preventable but hard to predict. That I have been afraid of needles, the very thing that can stave off those complications, strikes me as a silly. But it’s real.
At the Red Cross office, the nurse got a good stick, and after 20 minutes of mild discomfort, my bag of blood was full. She thanked me and said goodbye. I told her I’d see her again in eight weeks.
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