I was talking to my Dad tonight as I do every couple of days and a couple of things struck me.

The first was that in February, around the time of my Dad’s Birthday, I will have been a diabetic for 18 years! It certainly doesn’t feel like that long right now but sometimes I also feel like I can’t remember ever not being a diabetic too.

That then started me off thinking about the days when we didn’t have insulin pens, it took a good 5 minutes to get a BG from the Reflolux S and you counted food in portions not carbohydrates. I have a really vivid memory from when I was about 9, sitting on my Mum and Dad’s bed at something like 3am waiting for my tester to give me my result so that I could see what my BG was before I passed out and it struck me, quite hard, just how damn far things have come. Actrapid and monotard, 10ml vials and a syringe, no sugar-free lollies and having to remember to inject 30 minutes before a meal because if you didn’t then you had to wait to eat instead are all gone. These days it takes 5 seconds to get a BG, we have Lantus, Glargine, Levemir, pens, analog insulings (sounds like a watch) finger prickers that don’t work like an axe, fast-acting insulin and I think, a lot more knowledge.

Having mulled that over, I woke at 4am last night and I was 19.7mmol/L because I forgot to attach my pump before I fell asleep and man did I feel like garbage! Nausea, headache, grumpy and couldn’t get back to sleep but you know what I did? I just had some of the insulin that I got from the chemist – for free and it was at that point that the second ‘thing’ struck me i.e. that we can get insulin at all…

I can’t imagine what it must be like to feel like that and not have access to what we have, struggling away constantly not knowing what is going to happen to you, or maybe your kids, brother, sister, mother, father or friend or whoever it is. It must be truly awful and so I’m going to start to donate to the guys at Life For A Child Program who “support the care of close to 1100 children in over 18 countries worldwide” who don’t have the money or access to treatment for diabetes. If I’m lucky enough to be able to afford something like a pump then I can stretch to shelling out a bit of moolah to this I reckon. Novo Nordisk thought so too aparently as I heard on the news this avo so they donated heaps of free insulin to about 10 African countries suffering from insulin shortages (I’m sure/hope they aren’t the only insulin manufacturers that do). They didn’t have to do that and even if they just did it for the publicity it’s not like the kids whose lives they have saved will care so neither do I – good on em!

All this has also got me thinking that I don’t really know squat about the circumstances, history or people that developed the first insulins or how they are produced and at what cost so I’m planning on doing some research (I can take people labelling me a geek) and find out what I can. To then save you the trouble/thrilling excitment of undertaking this task I’ll post some bits and bobs on here. It’ll be like pharmaceutical biochemistry 101!

- Aaron