Go find a thumbtack. The kind with the colorful plastic top, you know the ones. I’ll wait 'till you get back.
…
All right, ready? Good.
Now, observe the thumbtack. Look at the pointy metal bit that goes into the cubicle wall. Appreciate its size.
That’s about the size of the actual needle used when my little sister has to give herself an injection of insulin in public. The rest just looks like a big pen.
Put the thumbtack down on the table. Now, walk backward for a few feet. Observe the pointy metal bit once more.
That’s what you would see when she injects herself… IF it’s not obscured by her shirt, her arm, the table, or one of the people she’s with (at least one of which is usually true, she’s not an exhibitionist) and IF you happen to be looking at her during the 5-10 seconds it takes her to pull her shirt aside from her waist, inject, and put her shirt back down.
To see the difference between this and “shooting up”, go rent Requiem for a Dream or something.
Thirded. Also, I think tofu is really, really disgusting. I get nauseous just thinking about it. Therefore, anyone who eats tofu in public is being insensitive and discourteous. Because when you go out to eat, your single most important consideration should be my personal hang-ups. Certainly not something so trivially unimportant as the health of your child.
Another gigantic pussy checking in here. Thanks, Miller, for the info!
As i’ve posted elsewhere recently, I have an infuriating phobia of needles. I’d love to be rid of it, but I’m not sure how to be. So as it is, I try to avoid being around syringes except when necessary–and when it’s necessary, I try to limit my freakout about it.
If I saw someone break out the needle kit in a restaurant, I’d look away: it’s not something I want to see. But even seeing it would probably make me sweat, make me feel woozy. I hate that, but that’s how it is.
If you’re trying to be discreet about it, then I won’t be the least bit annoyed with you; them’s the breaks, and frankly, you got it a helluva lot worse than me. But if you’re defiantly and unnecessarily being ostentatious about it, I will be a little annoyed: my wooziness, my dizziness, is a pretty common reaction to needles, and you showed a lack of concern for it. I won’t come over and yell at you, and I won’t pit you, but I’ll be a little pissed off.
In short: folks like me, with severe needle phobias, need to accept that sometimes needles will be part of a public environment. Folks like you, with a severe need for needles in public, should make efforts to be as discreet as possible about their use.
I agree that a public restroom is not the place for this. A dining table is much cleaner. Suppose you load the tester, then poke your finger under the table and squeeze out the drop, bring the tester down to the lap and put the blood on. Clean the finger and eject the lancet, then put the whole business in a napkin. You REALLY have to look to be offended by that. As for the injection, just do is as discretely as possible. If you have one of those pen-type syringes, it can be done very quickly.
Instead of being offended, just thank goodness that you don’t have to do this when you eat. And if you did, would you want to be banished from eating out?
Am I the only one who sees a potential health risk to, say, the next people who use that table? Sure, in ideal situations, there won’t be any bodily fluids in contact with the table. A girl I go to school with has diabetes and insists on waiting until she is sitting at the table with us all before injecting her insulin. I personally find it gross, becaused used needles should be disposed of in a sharps container, not allowed to sit in a plastic wrapper on a table that, at best, will be wiped off in three hours time. If it’s punctured your skin, keep it out of a public space. You don’t blow your nose sitting at the table, do you?
Fair enough, though I still think your comparison to tofu-hatin is off the mark. Unless you literally feel like you’re going to pass out when you see someone getting a shot, it’s not a fair comparison.
Depending on the restaurant, I’d say the polite thing to do would be to step off to someplace private.
But it really wouldn’t bother me. I’d put it somewhere between eating with the wrong fork and forgetting to put your napkin on your lap. Certainly nowhere near, say, squatting on the table and crapping on it.
Blood is cleaner than saliva, Ninjachick, do you worry a lot about whether someone set their used fork down on that table? Also, see Qadgop’s post above.
Sorry to hear your diabetes is causing you additional problems. However, I would like to see a reliable cite that says that the additional 15 seconds it takes to get to the restroom to perform the subcutaneous injection is going to make a difference between managing diabetes effectively and going blind.
The diabetics I’ve known in my lifetime…some have been managing their disease (in the bathroom) for at least 30 years that I’ve known them. My uncle had only been managing his for around 3 years. Three were adult onset, one was juvenile onset. The guy I work with? Not sure how long he’s had it, but he goes to the bathroom to inject himself. I believe he does it four times a day.
Amen to that. My ex-roommate has diabetes. I even had him check my blood sugar once (different needle, don’t worry). The needle is so small, it’s hard for me to believe anyone at the next table would even see it. So everyone who claims to be offended by or scared of the needle is(are?) talking out of their collective asses.
And many times it isn’t an option to get the injection in a car beforehand. What are all you people doing gawking at nearby tables anyway?
I’m not sure you know what “straw man” means. I certainly can’t see how I’ve constructed any sort of misrepresentation of your statements. Your last post on the topic, in fact, led with some sarcastic comments about how we shouldn’t be teaching children not to blow their noses or adjust their privates with impunity, then went into a discussion about we should just do these things with discretion. If I have misunderstood, and you really have been trying to say that it is okay for others to conduct their own business and give an insulin injection, I do profoundly apologize.
Rude to put him on public display? Parade him? Why should it be a problem for him to be seen in public? Why should he be embarrassed or ashamed of this? You exemplify the main issue with your ignorant post here. He shouldn’t be and he won’t be embarrassed. Not by the likes of you, anyway.
Dammit Jim, I am a psychologist (and a parent), not a physician, so someone with medical chops will have to give you the complete lowdown, but from my understanding, from the moment he starts eating, he starts digesting the food and breaking it down. His body produces none of the insulin that helps you and I move sugars from the bloodstream into his cells. He therefore begins to have an increase in the amount of sugars that remain in the blood. These, particularly coursing through the tinier blood vessels, damage them and lead to neuropathy and retinopathy, and all the other ‘opathies that you may have heard are associated with diabetes. Humalog peaks in its effectiveness in 90 minutes, so it is fairly short acting, but still has some delay in moving sugars into the cells where they are needed. For the period of time that we were being lax (delaying giving him his insulin by 15 to 30 minutes sometimes) we saw his A1C reading go up.
Apart from that, we have to make two calculations to determine the amount of insulin to give him. One based on his pre-meal blood sugar level, and another based on the number of carbohydrates he had. This is far easier to determine while sitting at the table, with all the reminders of how much of each type of food that he ate remaining on the table. We could write all of this down so that we could do it later so that you don’t have a moment of discomfort, but I don’t think we’ll risk the potential increase in errors that we might make by adding those steps just for your nebbiness.
I have no idea why the diabetics you have known behaved the way they did. I do know that the idea of tight control is a fairly new one, and I think some of the types of insulin that are available now are relatively new. I do believe that in the not too distant past, people would monitor and treat once per day! Perhaps this is why they didn’t “shoot up.”
These are subcutaneous injections, not intravenous injections. There is no rubber strap or belt around the bicep action going on with these shots.
Bold this: Look away. We put the little square of napkin and the used syringe back in the kit and zip it back up.
Fuck you. (Man, it is a blast! Thanks, fucker!)
His diabetes is Type I Diabetes. This means his pancreas produces no insulin. I don’t know how it would be any more or less severe than anyone else with Type I Diabetes.
Well, these possibilities don’t make clear to me why we should never be able to go out to eat. The Humalog vial doesn’t leak. If it were empty, we would have replaced it. We’ve only broken one once, by dropping it on the kitchen floor. We’ve never had one break in the case. If we had to take him home, we’d just do that. As far as being jostled, well, in practice, that doesn’t happen either. We don’t do this in crowds, and it takes about two seconds to insert the needle and push the few units of insulin in and withdraw the needle.
A phobia of a needle does not necessarily depend on the size of the needle; nor does it depend on seeing the injection occur. A phobia of a needle is, by definition, an irrational fear. It is a fear triggered by a strange cause: it’s triggered by the concept of a needle. The knowledge that someone at the next table is giving themselves an injection is what would set my phobia a-tremblin.
Again, if you gotta do that, you gotta do that: I’m not going to fault you for it. At the same time, I would much appreciate it if you can do it in a way that I remain in blissful ignorance. If you can work the kit in your lap, or on the chair beside you, or even if you can place it where it’s hidden by a dish, that’ll make my life easier.
A question for the diabetics: so, what do you do with the used needles and the bloody test strip?
Count me among the people who agree that it’s “icky.” I do agree that medical procedures, especially ones that involve needles and blood-letting, should not be performed in a public eating establishment, if at all possible.
There are just certain things that according to generally accepted standards of eitquette should not be done in a restaurant while sitting at a table. For example, if I had a wound, I would not clean and dress it at the table, or change my band-aid or whatever. That is just gross. Other personal things such as blowing your nose, brushing your hair, picking teeth with a toothpick, applying/checking make-up, I would rather be done in private.
I always thought that the main thing that Shouldn’t Be Done while dining out is staring at other diners closely enough to notice that they are discreetly dealing with their life-threatening illness by taking medication.
