I am diabetic; some of you already know that. I'm now also on the needle; most of you probably didn't know that. I started giving myself injections about a month ago, and thus far it's been interesting.

I have always been scared of needles. I'm not quite sure I'm not still scared of them now. Every night I have to give myself an injection in the stomach. Every time, just before I push the needle in, I take a big breath and blow it out. That's because each time I inject, I'm not sure what I'm going to feel.

For instance, I've learned that if I alter the angle even slightly I will feel something. If I get it totally straight, I feel no pain, almost nothing. Angled, depending on how much angle, it can be a little bit of pain that goes away in a second, or a lot of pain that lasts a couple of hours. I've only made that mistake once; trust me on that one!

I've also already had to change medications. The first one I was on, called Levemir, has additives in it. I guess it's kind of the starter insulin, in that it has this scent that smells like bandages, if you can believe it, and that's supposedly so you can learn if you're doing it correctly or not. However, those additives can give you a rash, and I developed one that was a monster. So, now I'm on something new, called Lantus, that doesn't have any smell or any additives, supposedly. The rash is gone, but I'm still having some residual itching after a week.

Something else to learn about insulin is that, though it's all supposedly the same, it doesn't work like I thought it would. My doctor said I would only be on it as long as it took to bring my morning readings down, which have always been high. Well, one of the issues one has is trying to find the proper dosage to bring it down. I started out at 10 units per injection; I'm now up to 28 units, and it's just starting to come down. That's not good in my mind, but it is what it is. My readings are still nowhere close to where my doctor wants them to be, but we're monitoring what he's calling "progress".

As for weight,... In the year between my appointments, I didn't gain a single pound, and that was after I'd lost 30 pounds at the time. Now, insulin promotes weight gain, and this is where my earlier "supposedly" comes in, because different insulins promote different weight gains, and it varies between users. The first insulin I was on was supposed to promote weight gain the strongest, but it did nothing to me, but this new one is supposed to promote weight gain less, and I've gained 5 pounds. Ugh; why am I always the different one?

Anyway, I'm sharing this information because I'm hoping no one else ever gets to this point, but if you do there's nothing to really be scared of. I just want to be healthy, and at my age have realized that if this is the route I have to go to in order to get to where I want to be, then so be it.