A Broken Record
Hey Everyone,
Hope you all had the chance to get away for the last vacation of summer. I got out of town to relax for a few days, yet found my work following me in the strangest way.
I spent the weekend at a pig roast in Massachusetts, even though I actually don’t like pork at all ( something which annoyed my mother to know end while I was growing up). I instead went to catch up with some college friends I hadn’t seen in half a year. It wasn’t exactly a well-planned affair–a friend of mine called me and some buddies up a week earlier and said, “I haven’t seen you guys in months, and I just bought a 60-pound pig. Get up here.” None of us really knew how to roast a pig, either. We built a fire pit by the breaking rods off a bench press and shoving them into the ground, then we rotated the pig in the fire by by sliding it unto a pole attached to a bicycle wheel.
So yeah, it wasn’t exactly a high class affair.
I had a good time, and midway through I found out ( to my own shock) that I was not the only diabetic at the party, but one of three. Somewhere in the midst of sustaining ourselves before the pig was cooked (which basically meant eating either cookies or chips, because none of us coordinated what they were bringing) we each pulled out a pump and dialed in our carbs.
After we realized we were all diabetics we spent some time talking, and they were particularly interested in my work for the JDCA. Tod, it turned out, had been diagnosed only a few years ago, and even then they said that a cure was “only a few years away”. Anna had been diagnosed for much longer, beating me to the punch by about twelve years. She too had heard the same thing back during her diagnosis. When I explained some of the research going on, but many of the problems with how funding is distributed to it, they were pretty surprised.
“I’ve done one of those walks before,” Anna said, “a couple time’s actually. I just kind of assumed that it was…I don’t know. I guess I just thought it was all going towards some big cure project.”
We are all fairly young, and each of us has heard the mantra of a cure “being right around the corner”. It’s something that’s been recited for decades, and I can’t count the number of people much older than us who’ve heard the same thing throughout their lives. And we will continue to hear it–this empty, meaninglessly phrase–for decades to come if we don’t begin to change how funding is allocated, and at the very least, informing people of this disparity.
Until Next Time
–Nick
Give thanks to the pig! Pigs have been keeping people with insulin alive since insulin was discovered. The pig was the first source of insulin. Porcine insulin worked well and was still being used throughout the 1990s until the transition was made to synthetic versions of human insulin. 3 Random young adults with type 1 diabetes meeting up at a party is not even a coincidence anymore. It happens now because more people are becoming insulin dependent with either type 1 or some variation of diabetes. I meet people almost every day who take insulin. We all need to speak up for ourselves to demand greater urgency for a practical cure.
Nicholas, (spoken in a voice something like your mother’s)
There is hope for a cure. Don’t be so discouraged.
And the pig roast sounds like fun.