Greetings from Ambridge-sub-Aqua. Once again the Am has
broken it’s banks and is lapping at the back door of the surgery whilst the Koi
Carp are disporting with the Mallards on the car park, the bigger ones with a
decidedly hungry look about them, making me worry if there are such things as “man
eating cyprinidae”.
On a side note apparently Koi is Japanese for carp, so in
back translation that makes them “Carp-Carp” which sounds a bit like a stammer.
Apparently Koi is also a homophone for the Japanese word for love, which must
make for some interesting conversations in Japanese fish mongers and the like.
But, as usual, if you can have a “usual” in a journal as
infrequently updated as this, I digress, even within my digression.
Sorry.
I’ll try to get back on track.
Despite the recent downturn in the weather, nothing is
keeping the faithful of Ambridge -s-A from our door, and those that can breach
the sandbagged parapet and make it “over the top” continue to delight and
challenge in equal measure. A week or two back saw two consecutive
consultations with diabetic patients about their med's. Both are proper
old-school Type 1 diabetics, the sort that go from well to desperately ill and
needing insulin in a matter of a few days.
Sophie, the first of the two, is a veteran, having been
diabetic for almost as long as she can remember. She has her med's all figured
out, is supremely confident to adjust dosing according to her sugar levels,
which she monitors by finger prick four or five times a day. By all accounts,
and looking at the lab bloods for confirmation, her sugars are near perfect and
she is completely well. She has even had her flu jab and made the point that,
as with insulin, if you relax the muscle injected, it doesn’t hurt at all—a tip
worth passing on the 750 or so punters that will be in this Thursday for the
fourth round of our flu campaign this year. I’m thinking of getting some “Sophie
Says Relax” T shirts made.
Nick came next. He’s rather less self assured than Sophie.
He hates testing and injecting, but then he’s only been at it for a couple of
months, having been rushed in to hospital acutely unwell at the onset. He knows
what he’s taking and the dose is still changing. Understandably his sugars are
all over the shop when he tests them and he’s finding it all a bit
demoralizing. He needs his flu jab, so we sort it there and then, but he winces
despite my admonition that he must relax. (Easy to say when you’re the one
holding the needle eh?)
We are being encouraged to put new patients in touch with
more experienced “expert” patients to improve their knowledge of their
condition, its impact and treatment in the hope that this will yield better
outcomes. Diabetes is at the forefront of this approach and Nick could
certainly do with some of Sophie’s wisdom.
The only problem is, that despite being diabetic for almost
half a lifetime, Sophie is only six years old, and Nick is in his early
twenties.
(Oh, and yes, Sophie did come in with her Dad, but she did all the talking and was plainly in total control of her condition and its treatment.)
