[kidvid]

I hope you don't mind my sharing these thoughts. Writing them down and thinking them through helps me stay "up" this time or year. I was diagnosed 2 years ago during the holiday season, so this annual mental review is my new tradition.

If I were born in my father's time, I would have suffered an early death. I may whine about shots and I may cry about carbs, but this condition is much preferrable to dead.

I have preserved for all time a couple of hypodermic needles from around 1940 or so. They are big and scary and hang framed on black velvet above my dining room table. When I sit there and rip open a sterile pump cartridge pack, I cannot help but see them.

I am living on borrowed time. If the cosmos had spun ever so slightly in a different trajectory I would have lived and died in a different era. The key word here is "died".

So this time I'm living in is the "bonus round". Millions of diabetics before me died in the crib or wasted away in some dingy ward in a DKA coma, or better yet were treated by blood-letting till they were dead, dead, dead.

So I'm going to squelch the tears, gag back the nausea from my new ACE inhibitor, load up the ol' kit bag with needles and strips and such, and head out on holiday. This is the Bonus Round!

Joe

I would sell my soul for a cure.

[Jan B]

Joe,

I like that you shared these thoughts. We truly are blessed to be living in this day. I do think about all those poor souls before insulin was available, just wasting away in misery.

[xMenace]

I've had such thoughts, but they are fleeting. I am still so much better off than most on this planet. I'm sitting here on a cold winter day plunking away at my laptop while much of the world struggles to survive. How many die of starvation daily? Ever visit a paliative care ward? Ya, these thoughts die a quick death.

[orsaugen]

KidVid:
Your post reminded me that I have been remiss in not saving the parpahernalia we used to deal with diabetes when I was first diagnosed in 1944. I was six years old, and memories stay with me about the huge needles which we had to sharpen with a mechanical device, of boiling syringe partrs every day, of meaningless "fasting blood sugar" tests where I traveled by skis and railroad to reach a doctor's office some four hours after I had taken my morning insulin shot, and had had nothing to eat. Novo Nordisk introduced Lente and Ultralente insulin a few years lafter, and those products have kept me going. Today's technologies, with smart insulin pens, CGM systems and much more make those old days seem genuinely primitive!

[notme]

Had I been born in my grandmother's place in 1903, I don't think I would have survived. I have thought about that often.

Like XMenace, I think about it for a fleeting moment and then feel thankful that I have a home, my artificial health and my family. It could be much worse. Diabetes is not the worst thing that could happen to a person. It is inconvenient at times, but not a death sentence. Certainly, I am better off than my grandmother would have been.

[HollyB]

When we bought our cottage (including contents) the work bench had a drawer stuffed full of big, used, glass insulin syringes. (Who knows why the previous owner, who was there ten years with three little kids, didn't get rid of them?) 8 years later there we were with my son and a suitcase full of pens, pump gear, strips and insulin. Yes, I'm grateful he's alive now and not then.