She Never Once Flinched
I never thought I'd be someone who injects themselves with medication. Then I remembered who taught me it wasn't a big deal, and it wasn't even a person.
I never thought I’d be someone who injects themselves with medication. Not out of any strong principle. Just, needles aren’t a thing I’ve ever been relaxed about, and “inject yourself, once a week, indefinitely” sounded like a problem for a different, braver kind of person.
Diabetes sufferers do this every single day. I knew that logically. It didn’t make the idea of doing it to myself any less of a mental hurdle before that first click.
A few years before any of this, we had a dog called Roxy Too. A Rottweiler, and the soppiest, most loveable one you could ask for. All bulk and no menace, the kind of dog who’d lean her full weight against your leg and call that affection.
She developed diabetes. Which meant insulin, every day, for the rest of her life.
No pen for her. Old-fashioned vial and syringe, a proper needle, longer than anything in a KwikPen. The routine was always the same: grab the scruff, get the needle in, done.
She never once objected. Never flinched, never pulled away, never made it a fight. She just trusted that this was something that happened now, and let it happen.
She’s been gone a few years. I think about her more than I expected to, and this is one of the things that comes back.
Because somewhere in deciding whether I could actually do this to myself every week, I remembered her standing there, taking a bigger needle than mine without so much as a flinch, every day, without ever once being given a reason why. If she could do that on trust alone, I genuinely had no excuse to be sitting here talking myself out of a needle smaller than hers, for my own benefit, for a reason I understood perfectly well.
That’s not really advice. I’m not going to pretend a dead dog’s syringe routine is a clinically sound way to talk yourself into an injection. But it’s the honest reason the hesitation didn’t win.
If it helps me shift the weight and get on top of the health problems that came with it, that’s not a big ask. It was time for a change, and she’d already shown me, without meaning to, that it really wasn’t that big a deal.
The first click turned out to be nothing. I’d built it up into something it never was. She could have told me that, if dogs could talk. As it is, she just went ahead and showed me instead.