Plastic or…
The other day I was at my friend Kagen’s house and my pump stopped working.
A few minutes after I bolused for lunch I saw a wet spot under my shirt, smelled it, and realized I was leaking insulin. (Sidenote: Is it me, or is insulin the most distinct smell in the world? Nothing else smells like it.) It wasn’t a huge deal–I generally have a replacement set on me at all times, so I went into the bathroom and changed. When I was done, I threw the needle into the toilet.
“What are you doing?” Kagen asked me. “Some fish is gonna get that caught in their throat.”
I shrugged. ” Do you have a sharps container?”
She shook her head no.
“A used coffee can or something?”
She shook her head again.
“Down she goes.” I flushed.
We went on eating lunch, but I spent time thinking about that for a while afterwords. At my apartment I have a sharps container, but anywhere else my needles get flushed down the toilet. Before that moment, I never took the time to think if there could be a problem in doing that. The needle has to wind up somewhere, right? Where? And how many other PWD’s do the same thing?
I talked about the cost of diabetes on this blog before–the turmoil this disease can reek on your health, and the billions of dollars that go into a bloated system of medication and treatment. But I’ve never thought of the possible environmental impact of the disease. Consider all the needles, test strips, lancets you can go through on a daily basis. If you’re a pump user, the infusion sets that you go through every three days. I refill my insulin cartrage using a plastic, disposable device every three days. Diabetics go through a tremendous amount of plastics each year in keeping up with their disease, and on top of that the needles we rely on for treatment are incredibly hard to get disposed of any way else. In 10 years, I’ve probably sent hundreds of needles down the toilet, and it’s foolish to believe that they won’t wind up anywhere harmful.
There haven’t been many studies done on the environmental cost of living with diabetes, but when you consider the amount of materials that go into the upkeep of millions of people, I imagine the numbers would be staggering.
The fallout of diabetes is mult-faceted and difficult to comprehend, both in health, money, and our effect on the world around us. More treatments are not the answer, and placing on our hope on the possiblity of an ideal cure that could take another century to create is also useless. The answer is a Practical Cure.
Until Next Time
–Nick
I have no idea where that stuff goes. I personally do not flush any of it down the tollet. I recycle the parts that can be, and cover up the sharps with the hard plastic packaging it comes in.
Back in the “old days” people with diabetes are what we would consider “super-green.” In the late ’60′s I had an older relative who had to take insulin shots. He would take his stainless steel insulin syringe and pass the needle over a whetstone to sharpen it. His wife would put a pot of water on the stove to boil and they’d use that to clean & disinfect the syringe. He’d draw a dose, inject it and then get back to his regularly scheduled life, already in progress. Nothing went top a landfill, there weren’t any ‘sharps’ to dispose of and he recycled that one syringe until the day he died. On the other hand, the needle was about the size of today’s IV needle, the insulin came from pigs and by our standards simply awful.
I was surprised as I read this post that you would flush a needle. That thought had simply never occurred to me in the 19 years I’ve had Type I. When on multiple daily injections I’d recap the syringe after use and if I was not at home I’d keep it with me for later disposal in my sharps container. After starting on a pump, I’d fold the cap over the top of the inserter needle and do the same thing as with a syringe. What if your needle had gotten stuck in a drain, or helped to cause a clog that somebody else would have to deal with?
Hey Tom,
I should be more specific. It was the needle portion of a pump, which is much smaller than a regular syringe. And about the clogging, after I did it the first time and nothing bad happened, I ( as with most bad habits) just kept doing it.