Are you afraid of needles?
Injections are many people's childhood nightmares. A needle that is not much thicker than a hair, stuck to the buttocks, makes people doubt life. Some people with bad bones and experienced needles must have experienced that even if the needles are not next to the skin, just rubbing the alcohol cotton ball is enough to shock people's hearts.
But there is such a group of people in the world, who carry a small box with them, and at a certain moment they have to open their clothes to give themselves a needle. Some patients have four injections a day, and more than 1,400 injections a year, and such a day will last a lifetime.
They are the diabetics who need to inject insulin, and because they need to inject frequently, they also laugh at themselves as "people who live on the tip of the needle." But the helplessness behind this ridicule, who is needled, who understands. We recently spoke with three people with diabetes to hear their stories together.
Li Xin is 34 years old | 15 years old
Tsinghua had hundreds of windows in ten canteens, and he could only go to one or two
In 2006, 19-year-old Li Xin stood out from more than 500,000 candidates in Anhui and was admitted to the Department of Electronic Engineering of Tsinghua University. Sunny campus, spirited teenagers, everything is so bright.
But when the military training was over and he was in the midst of his busy studies, he suddenly realized that something seemed wrong. He had eaten a lot, but his weight was losing day by day; he had to pour a lot of water every day, and the toilet ran again and again, but he still felt thirsty. He began to think that it was just caused by the pressure of studying, but when he came home from winter vacation for more than a month, his symptoms became more and more serious, and he loved to play football and even struggled to ride a bicycle.
"Football youngster" | Li Xin provided a picture
Li Xin originally had a very good biology, and he searched the Internet again, and found that this is called "three more and one less", which is a typical symptom of diabetes, and he can't help but giggle. Later, he urinated more and more frequently, and the number of night ups became more and more frequent, so he went to the school hospital. Sure enough, the fasting blood glucose exceeded the standard, and the urine glucose was four plus signs, confirming diabetes.
More seriously, Li Xin had already developed ketoacidosis at that time, which is one of the acute complications of diabetes and may be fatal when it is severe. So Li Xin was admitted to the inpatient department by the school hospital on the spot and began to do emergency treatment. Because he already had a psychological cushion, he did not have any mood swings, but the parents who received the call rushed from Anhui by train that night and cried into tears. Crying and crying, the disease still has to be cured. Li Xin was arranged to be injected with insulin, received injections in the school hospital for three days, and then transferred to the Third Hospital of Beijing Medical College.
After ten days of injections, Li Xin's blood sugar was well controlled, but these ten days were only the beginning - he was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, and he had problems with his own pancreas and could not produce insulin in sufficient amounts, and he had to be injected for life. He had thought that he would carry a medical kit with him and take out the medicine to beat his stomach like in the hospital, but in the last two days of hospitalization, the nurse took a pen-like thing, asked him to unscrew it, and pushed it on his belly.
Insulin injection before meals and before going to bed has become a life rule that Li Xinlei can't move| Li Xin provided a picture
Later, he recalled the scene of that day, and did not forget to give the pen a humorous evaluation: "Visually less impactful, much better pain." In order to control blood sugar, he must get up at a fixed point, eat at a fixed point, and walk for an hour after dinner; before each meal, he must inject himself, and then inject himself before going to bed, which has become the law of his life.
Each meal should also be carefully matched, trying to ensure that the calories eaten, the amount of staple food, and the amount of meat and vegetables are under control. Among the ten canteens in Tsinghua, he finally chose to eat at several windows in one of the canteens for a long time in order to control his blood sugar more smoothly.
Living in the dormitory, every move the roommate will know, Li Xin has been injecting like this for seven years, and only once has a roommate joke with him: "Are you taking drugs?" He also knew that his roommate was not malicious, but the roommate knew that he was speechless and had never said it since.
In 2013, Li Xin graduated from graduate school and embarked on a programming job, "busy" became the new normal of his life, and missed typing inevitably happened. For people with type 1 diabetes, missing beats is dangerous because they don't produce enough insulin on their own and rely on injections. Once Li Xin had a dinner and measured his blood sugar, found that it rose a little high, and wanted to exercise to consume blood sugar. But the exercise was getting more and more wrong, and he found that his blood sugar was still rising, and he realized that he had forgotten to fight. It took a long time to toss the day before the blood sugar was controlled.
In order to prevent missing hits, Li Xin thought of many ways. The most intuitive thing is to take a marker and draw a circle on the belly for each injection, or simply change the needle with each injection. But this was troublesome after all, and it wasn't until 2018, when he used a new injection pen with memory function, that he solved the problem. But as a programmer, he felt it would be more intuitive if the pen could analyze the data directly.
Uncle Qi is 79 years old | 40 years of illness
What you eat at each meal must be written down in a notebook
Uncle Qi is 79 years old this year, but no one who meets him for the first time can guess his age. Full of red light, the waist is up and down, and it looks more than 60.
Uncle Qi, who had just finished participating in the movement, | provided by Uncle Qi
Uncle Qi's health has always been good, he was a sprinter when he was a child, and when he was a teenager or a young Qi, he participated in the National Junior Games twice. At that time, he was also envious of the profession of doctor, and later entered the medical school, after graduation was assigned to practice medicine in Daxinganling for 11 years, and only in the late 1970s was transferred back to Beijing to continue to work as a doctor in neurology.
Returning to his family, Dr. Qi was in a good mood, his life was much more comfortable, and he was soon blessed, weighing 145 pounds in one meter and seven feet. Who would have thought that, starting in 1981, he suddenly lost weight and was particularly prone to thirst. He rode from the second ring road to the Tongxian Tuberculosis Hospital, and when he returned, he found himself thirsty and his lips were cracked, and he drank two large bowls of tea for five cents a bowl next to the Great Hall of the People.
The next year's physical examination found that the problems of thinness and easy thirst were. A check of urine glucose, four plus signs; the next morning check an empty stomach blood glucose, then the measurement unit is different from now, giving a result of 170 mg / dL, exceeding the standard a lot, diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. Dr. Qi himself is a doctor, while buying "Diabetology" and "Treatment of Diabetic Complications" to turn it himself, while going to the hospital, eating metformin and other hypoglycemic drugs prescribed by doctors, while strictly controlling diet.
After eating metformin, Dr. Qi's weight dropped rapidly. Go to the toilet in the middle of the night, walk through the dressing mirror and dare not look; in the morning at the nurse's station, wearing a white coat weighed only 105 pounds. And blood sugar is getting harder to control. In 1997, Dr. Qi, who was in his 50s, began to administer insulin to control blood sugar under the instructions of doctors. He knew that diabetes had progressed to this point where it was difficult to return to a state that could be controlled by taking medicine, and he laughed and told people that he was "on the thief's boat".
In the process of controlling blood sugar himself, Dr. Qi found that the public did not know enough about diabetes. After his retirement in 2002, he joined a hotline dedicated to patients, answering patients' calls and telling them how to control their blood sugar. At this time, he was already known as Uncle Qi, on the one hand, as a doctor to the consultant science popularization, on the other hand, he also shared his experience as a sugar friend.
Some sugar friends blood sugar control effect is not ideal, Dr. Qi will guide them to record whether it is high fasting blood sugar or high blood sugar after meals, so as to give it to the doctor's reference; some sugar friends are prone to hypoglycemia, Dr. Qi suggested that they record the recipe, and then go to the doctor when the doctor knows how to adjust; and some sugar friends will not use the injection pen, Dr. Qi also teaches them to grasp which piece, where to cut, in case of more than one how to adjust. Uncle Qi's hotline is very busy, ranging from 20 to 40 calls a day, and he has received no less than 200,000 calls in 19 years.
Even as a professional doctor, Uncle Qi will occasionally miss and forget to take insulin. Since 2010, Uncle Qi has carried a pen and a notebook with him, and what he ate at each meal, how many units of insulin he hit, and how to write down his blood sugar before and after meals were all written down, one by one. Eleven years later, he used five of his notebooks, each of which was particularly delicately preserved.
What to eat at each meal, the blood glucose values before and after the meal were recorded by Uncle Qi one by one| provided by Uncle Qi
From his many years of anti-sugar experience, Uncle Qi summed up a few words to sugar friends:
Eat seriously, insist on daily exercise, go to work easily and happily, and be happy every day.
He hopes that all sugar friends can effectively control diabetes and don't let this disease control themselves.
Little Sugar Treasure 4 years old| 0.5 years old
At the age of four, he wasn't even afraid of syringes
Xiao Sugar Bao is 4 years old this year, half a year ago his mother found that he urinated frequently, ate and drank more than before, but the weight did not increase but fell, and he lost a few pounds after more than a month. After being admitted to the hospital, Xiao Sugar Bao was quickly diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, and insulin injections were also arranged, and he was hospitalized for half a month, injecting four times a day.
Who's children are not the heart meat, before the little sugar treasure cold fever injection, all cry wow wow, the first time was injected with insulin also shed tears.
Back home, trouble ensued. Xiao Sugar Bao's family lives in eastern Guangdong, the hospital only adults with injection pens, the minimum adjustable scale is 1 unit, but Xiao Sugar Bao is too young, the doctor prescribes a dose of 2.5 units each time, and the mother is not a professional medical staff, it is difficult to do accurate injection. Children are light in weight, playing more may be low blood sugar, playing less may not work well, so the blood sugar of the small sugar treasure has been not very stable, high and low. And the site of the mother's injection is in that piece, and there have been small subcutaneous hard lumps for a long time.
In October 2021, mom and dad brought Xiao Sugar Bao to Guangzhou Women and Children's Medical Center and stayed in the hospital for 10 days, on the one hand, to better control blood sugar, on the other hand, to learn injection techniques. The hospital opened an injection pen for small sugar treasure for children's patients, which can be adjusted from 1 unit to 0.5 unit, and Nurse Fan taught Xiao Sugar Bao's mother how to choose the injection site, how to rotate the injection site, insulin onset time and diet, and how to take Xiao Sugar Bao for a walk after meals. After 10 days of treatment and study, Xiao Sugar Bao's blood sugar control effect was good, and he was successfully discharged from the hospital and started a new life.
Nurse Fan, who cares for Xiao Sugar Bao, has been practicing for nearly 30 years, and has been in the endocrinology department for more than 20 years, like Xiao Sugar Bao,Diabetic children, she is involved in the care of thousands of diabetes education, and the problems faced by Little Sugar Bao are also common problems for many diabetic children. Diabetic children with light weight injection dose is relatively small, and most of the insulin injection pen minimum scale is a unit, can not meet the needs of small sugar treasures; many small sugar treasure parents have to choose a special syringe to help children inject insulin, they have to learn to calculate, dilute, injection and other methods, parents are difficult, the baby is also painful.
In recent years, there are semi-scale special insulin pens specially designed for children, as well as memory functions, and the operation is also simple and easy to learn. The diabetes management team of the Department of Endocrinology of Guangzhou Women and Children's Medical Center conducts a series of diabetes and nursing education for each hospitalized little sugar treasure and parents, so that sugar treasure and parents can receive standardized learning.
Nowadays, there are more and more children with diabetes, and the number of children with type 1 diabetes admitted to the endocrinology department every year has a trend of increasing year by year. Their expectations for insulin injection pens in the future are mainly that the scale can be more precise, so that they can serve smaller patients. In a one-month-old child who had just been diagnosed in their department, the doctor could only prescribe 0.2 units of insulin, compared with 0.25 units and 0.3 units before that.
Another expectation of Nurse Fan is whether the needle of the insulin injection pen can be thinner so that the children are not afraid. The finer it is, the less painful it is, and the more it benefits the patient.
We believe that this is also the common expectation of nearly 30,000 families of children with diabetes and hundreds of millions of families of diabetics.