My daughter was fighting me every day at shot time. She would cry, hide, scream or beg me not to give her the daily injection. Since she was growth hormone deficient it really wouldn’t hurt her to skip an injection once and a while. She was aware of that, so it didn’t make it any easier. Those of you with diabetic children need multiple techniques, to deal with multiple shots in a day.

Originally she would only take her shots in her upper arm, a few inches below her shoulder. She would switch arms daily, but repeatedly using the same areas caused tenderness and bruising. I hated to have her wear a short sleeved blouse for fear that someone would accuse us of child abuse. Finally, after much coaxing and prodding, we convinced her to try taking her shot on the front side of her thigh. She decided that she liked this method as long as she was sitting down. If she was standing up during the injection it seemed to be more painful, I guess because the muscle was tense.

After that it wasn’t too difficult to talk her into trying the shots in her abdominal area, just under her belly button. Now that we had multiple locations to give injections, we could let her choose where she wanted the shot, which gave her some control and helped the attitude. The rotation of injection sites allowed healing time and the bruising just about disappeared so I suppose the shots were also less painful.

We let her practice giving injections to an orange. When she was comfortable with that we let her try giving herself her daily injections. Mastering this gave her new freedom to spend the night with friends and go to camps that weren’t just for special needs. She started to feel like she was a normal child; I think she was nine years old at that time.

We explained to her why she needed the shots, and what the medicine was doing for her body. We checked out age appropriate books from the library with pictures to help her understand. Then every few years we went over the information again, as children process information differently at different ages, and it may have meant something different to her as she grew older. In fact, I just explained it to her again last month and she is eighteen years old now. Therefore, she knows everything and doesn’t need shots or medicine anymore. Grin.

If you’d like to read more about growth hormone deficiency and our family’s experience with it please look at one of my earlier articles called “What is Pituitary Dwarfism (Growth Hormone Deficiency, Panhypopituitarism?)” If you have other ideas that worked well for your child or questions, I’d love to hear them. Please, don’t hesitate to contact me.