As discussed in Number 12 – Does it Hurt? People with diabetes are subjected to a plethora of misconceptions about the disease, its origins and its treatment. It doesn’t help, therefore, to have prime time television dramas that include ludicrous storylines that only serve to further confuse and obfuscate the realities of living with diabetes and likely problems encountered.
I used to think that dramas were well-researched – particularly by the BBC – and that all that medical jargon that flows from the mouths of all our favourite medics on Casualty would possess a high degree of accuracy if compared to ‘real life’. Sadly, that notion has been undermined severely since I became more acquainted with the world of hospitals, medicine, and diabetes in particular.
It seems that the potential hazards of living with diabetes, coupled with a scriptwriter’s inadequate knowledge and research, or ‘artistic license’ to twist the truth, provide a rich vein of dramatic storylines. On one particular episode we were presented with the tale of a young girl caught up in some sort of bizarre boating accident. The girl was diabetic, Type 1, and had unfortunately been parted from her insulin in the course of the accident and it now lay attracting the attention of the deep water fish of some fictitious lake.
So what, you might think, diabetes is a common enough ailment and insulin is readily available in every pharmacists and hospital in the country. Ah! Not ‘Bentillin’, unfortunately, this is a uniquely formulated insulin that has no history of animal origin or testing, and is only available at Jacob’s Chemist in Penzance! From this point the storyline becomes ever more ludicrous, with the girl rapidly descending into diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA) and heading for coma. This, despite the fact that she probably hasn’t eaten anything since the accident so has no food digesting to boost her blood sugars. Of course, the reason must be that ‘Bentillin’ is a single-speed insulin – it must be, since this is the only insulin she (and her father) will accept, and therefore her blood sugar levels are being rapidly driven up by her liver with no insulin on board to cope with it. Oh dear! Why am I trying to rationalise this? The scriptwriter clearly didn’t!
There follows a moral dispute between the doctors and the girl’s father over whether they should administer ‘ordinary’ insulin, with a young doctor eventually taking it upon himself to administer this and she rapidly (instantly!) recovers! Becky kindly provided a transcript of the storyline in this post.
OK, it’s a TV soap-drama and most of the detail will have passed completely over the head of most people watching. Without the complete invention of something that doesn’t exist (Bentillin), however, there would have been no storyline at all. Joe Public, would have been left with the impression, however, that the story was fact-based and that there exists a chemist in Penzance that is the only provider of an insulin suitable for animal rights diabetics. Sadly, we have yet to see a diabetic storyline in any drama that matches reality – there is usually some dramatic device that leaps completely away from reality and invalidates the whole storyline. Neighbours, Eastenders, Home and Away, Coronation Street – all have had diabetic storylines that are either mangled versions of the truth, or conveniently forgotten once the focus has moved away.
This led me to the conclusion that Jacob’s had somehow perfected a blend of insulin and clotted-cream ice cream in some sort of cottage-industry medical facility, and wished to retain the monopoly by refusing to share the secrets of the process with the wider community – illustrating once again that the often ludicrous topics raised on the forum are rich pickings for poetic inspiration!
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