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Good old days?

ljwilson

Well-Known Member
Messages
190
Location
West Sussex
Type of diabetes
Type 1
Treatment type
Insulin
Dislikes
Diabetes!
I am seeing a hospital consultant next week for the first time in years next Friday so I have been keeping a glucose and carb portion diary for the past couple of weeks so that he can have an overview of how I am doing. I always count carbs but I usually do it in my head and I haven’t kept a diary for years! It has struck me how different it is now to when I was first diagnosed in the mid 70’s!

At that time nothing had the nutritional info on the labels and all I had to go on was the small book giving to me by the dietician. If I wanted a soft drink I was limited to Schweppes Slimline Lemonade or Bitter Lemon then along came TAB and Fresca and changed my life!! How much easier it is today with everything labelled and most things available in a sugar free variety.

I would inject once a day with my old glass and metal syringe and needle and then test my urine with the clinetest tablet, 10 drops water and 5 drops of wee hoping for a blue result but more often than not getting bright orange! My control was terrible in my teens, I used to water down my samples! Now with multiple injection and blood testing my control is reasonable, although it could always be better

Good old days? Perhaps not

Lorna
 
Hello there

Probably not good old days for Type 1 diabetes then The technology we have nowadays has obviously come on such a lot over the decades. I can't imagine what it must of really been like for you ( I was diagnosed in 1989). My uncle had Type 1 diabetes in the 1970's, but I don't know how long he had had it for, that sort of thing wasn't discussed in the house, all I knew was that when my uncle stayed with us, my mum went straight to Boots and bought Diabetic food for him.

Good luck for tomorrow and I hope your appointment goes well.

Best wishes RRB
 
Oh lordy i remember those days. The test tube and drops of water and pee and having to colour in little squares in an exercise book to match the result for clinic reviews. Ugh and i remember my mom having to boil those glass and metal syringes then put them in a tupperware tub in surgical spirit. Ha ha i was 5 years old when i was diagnosed in 1975 and remember having a strop and telling mom and dad i was leaving home. When i sheepishly returned from walking 2 yards down the road my dad had locked the door and put my tupperware tub on the doorstep as a joke [FACE WITH STUCK-OUT TONGUE AND WINKING EYE] It is much better these days. How on earth did we survive on 1 injection a day??!!


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Hi I suppose 1 injection was better than none at all then :roll: Having at least some insulin would of kept you alive, as it obviously did. Often it can be down to the survival instinct as well, to want to live. A book I read a few years ago said diabetes was treated with Opium :shock: now there's a thought :sick:

RRB
 
Hi there, your post brought back my early diabetes days! I remember the sister in hospital jabbing my thumb with a scalpel blade to get a sugar result. I was eight and my mum cried! I also use to add water to get those clinitest results better than expected. I was in for a check up at my local hospital diabetes centre and thought how nice it was to be in a small centre just for endocrine disorders - in the old days I would wait several hours to be seen by the diabetic specialist and the waiting room was full of very very old people sat on ripped apart chairs. As a child I use to dread hospital visits. Now I feel Im part of a club.
 
Yes me too, i was always the youngest by decades at the diabetic and eye clinic. At the age of 19 i had cataracts in both eyes and was partially sighted (jeez the amount of things i fell over and the number of friends i walked past lol). I went into hospital to have them removed and eveyone on the ward was over 70!

Yes RobinRedBreast, i think those days of one shot of insulin managed to keep us alive, but it was so regimented on times to eat and amount of food i could have. I also used to get so jealous of my brother who everyday after school got a texan bar and i got a natural yoghurt! I have an old Merck Manual that doctors used back in the day and they treated diabetes with arsenic too along with opium :-s. Scary huh. We do have it good now.


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I was on 2 shots a day. Also got so many bright orange tests that I gave up after a year. My parents thought I had it all under control and they never bothered to learn about it, so I got away with anything
 
Relate to what everyone has said, I started on twice daily injections but remember the Clinitest Kit and the glass syringes all to well.

Good old days..........most certainly NOT!!!!!
 
Thanks folks, loving the memories. 50 years type1 here and the changes have been amazing.

I remember the little trays of stainless steel needles each of which was to last about 10 days. Also, the glass syringes came in two different needle fittings. If I recall correctly mines was Luer and my mother and grandmother's were the older, narrower 'Record' fit. In our house it was a mass 'boil up' every night, using three different pots to sterilise each of our kits.

The diet sheet was scary. Instructions like, 'two potatoes each no larger than the size of a hen's egg'. The Sunday treat for me was the little bar of Walls ice-cream which i think cost sixpence. I wasn't allowed the wafers though :lol:

Anyone remember the Palmer Injector gun? My older brother kindly bought me this after he started his first job. It felt like a gun, had a trigger and you placed the glass syringe firmly along it's top, pulling it back to increase the tension. There was a little base plate you rested against the skin then you pulled the trigger. Whoosh, the whole syringe shot forward and the needle went deeply into you. I was only then about 12 years old and it scared the heck out of me. I only remember using it once although I couldn't tell my brother that!

Bill
 
Am loving this thread! I haven't had diabetes for as long as some of you but I was diagnosed in 1982 in New Zealand so it may as well have been the 70's! :wink:

I remember having to rub my 2 different bottles of insulin between the palms of my hands to warm them up before painstakingly drawing up the insulin in a syringe. And I went for years throughout my teens not testing my sugar levels at all (I was rebelling I believe) and then making up the results in my log book in a last minute panic before my visit to the diabetic clinic for my regular check ups. I'm sure they must've known I was lying but they never let on. My control was terrible!

Luckily I've grown out of that now and although my control is by no means perfect (last HbA1C was 7.3%) I consider myself lucky to have had this condition for 31 years and so far have no complications - touch wood. I am much more in control now and wonder why on earth I didn't realise how important that is when I was younger. Teenage hormones I'm sure!
 


Thankfully never had to use the injector gun, just did a Google search and it looks Medieval :shock:


This device was the pits of all finger prickers, hurt like hell...



 

My mum got the gun for myself and my brother (he was diagnosed 5 weeks after me) and I still have the scars to prove it. If you didn't have the syringe in the correct position the whole of the needle and the top of the syringe could end up embedded in you, it had a lot of force behind it!
 
I remember the gun, i think i was lucky not to have one. With that said i remember the first finger pricking device, the Autolet something or other. It was square, black and looked like a diy tape measure. Rather than prick your finger it sort of slashed it due to the angle of the lancet, which arced downwards rather than going straight down into your skin!

I also remember having to fill in lots of made up results the night before clinic visits and looking back i was pretty much left to my own devices and responsible for my own care from a very young age :-s

Rochari - your mass boil up line made made me chuckle!! My mom used to forget she'd put mine on to boil and they'd go black.


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LOL Ladybirdy, yip that happened a few times at our house too. One other thing I forgot about was watching my grandmother heating a test-tube over the gas ring. She didn't like the Clinitest tablets and continued using Benedict solution. Sadly, her mother died from the disease which was before insulin was available so our house was very disciplined with injections and diets. That discipline left a huge impression on me which has lasted a lifetime (and made life difficult sometimes too).

Never mind, things move on and thank goodness for that.

Bill
 
Omg I remember all that and I've only been diabetic 27 years lol that finger prick device I remember it well blood on a test strip for a minute wipe it off leave a minute then compare colours well is it closer to 10 or 6 hmmm think its 6 !! My dad bought me an electronic blood machine one year and I thought that was the best thing ever now I get blood results in 5seconds and have a pump yes I remember those days but I don't miss them !!!


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Rochari - gosh that's so sad. It's hard to imagine there was a time without insulin isn't it. We all know what it feels like when our BG's are high so your poor Grandma must have felt so poorly. Thankfully we live in a time where the best care and devices are available. Be nice to have that cure now!!!!

Rayh78 - lol yes it was hard to get an exact match on those old test strips. They were around in my late teens and I had cataracts so couldn't see the colours properly :-S. if it was over 13mmol you had to leave it for a 3rd minute. I did a lot of that ;-).


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Fascinating to hear about your experiences from 40-50 years ago. How things have changed. Perhaps we should grumble less at what the NHS offers us these days even if it isnt always perfect.
 
Oh, what fun we had years ago!!! The scalpel for finger pricks hurt sooo much, my fingers would be sore for days! I was very lucky, in that when I was expecting my first baby, the blood glucose meter had been invented, and I borrowed one from the hospital. The very loud beep was so embarrassing, people used to run and hide when they heard it! But it was such an improvement on the clinitest set. I remember making up my clinitest chart results one January, and the dr. said I couldn't possibly have had such good results over Christmas...oops!!!
 
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