In March, it will be seventeen years. Seventeen long, grueling years. Years of promises, hope, and disappointments. The past years have included dozens of news articles, emails, updates, and doctor's promises that a cure is on the horizon.
The next five years. The next ten. Soon. We're making progress. Any day! Before you have kids. Before your kids are grown.
The promises abound. The hope alights. But the disappointment is great when five, ten years, soon disappears. Today, I'm wondering why we don't have a cure. Why are we being promised so many things and seeing so much "progress" but nothing is getting to me? Nothing is getting down to the lay-men who are living with this disease? Exactly why do all the mice get cured and I'm stuck injecting and pricking thousands of times?
Is it the FDA? Are they putting stops on things that might show promise? Are they holding back because diabetes is a money making machine?
Is it those pesky mice that are just keeping it all to themselves? Are we looking at a mice-diabetes takeover in the near future?
Exactly what is causing this slow down? I get monthly updates about how a new research technique has shown extensive effects in mice or in trials of curing diabetes. I see it all the time in the news about how a new drug, new therapy cured the mice or cured the trial participants for several years. I see it...but why don't I get it? Why am I not feeling the cure?
I remember when I was about ten years old or so. Talk of a seaweed cure was everywhere in the diabetes front. Seaweed had been put into the pancreas with new, working islet cells and showed great promise not to cause an immune reaction in the diabetic. They were cured. So I though, at ten years old, that I might get that. I thought, seaweed is kind of gross. But if it works...
Yet here I am, not cured all these years later. After cancer drugs have showed promise. After stem cells have cured people. After all sorts of issues have been solved. I'm still not cured!
Hey, Washington! Did you realize that there are millions of us out here looking for this cure? Hoping for it? Did you realize that we're all scared to death that you'll keep promising and never follow through? Look at us!
Look at me. Look at this twenty-one year old who wants to grow old with her kids by her side, with a husband. Look at the girl who fears for her sight in the next ten years. Look at the girl who wakes up every morning thinking that it was a successful night if she didn't die. Look at me!
Look at Charlie. He's a little boy, who can't eat ice cream when he wants because insulin and its gadgets fail. Look at his parents who fight this battle every day, hoping, wishing, praying. Look at them!
Look at Kate. She's a teenager battling this disease every day, fighting against insulin that just doesn't bring numbers down and interference from every way she turns. Look at her!
Look at Kerri. Look at her spend so many moments on this disease, just to have a healthy pregnancy. Moments that you can't even begin to fathom. Moments that you never have to worry about. Look at her, look at her child!
Look at all of us...every diabetic in the world. 180 million of us. Look at us fight. Look at us watch our comrades fall every day, whether to complications or to a greater world. Look at us struggle together, hope together, and cry together.
Please someone look at us. Please someone heal us. Someone cure us. Take the research, take the closed loop system, the seaweed...and put it into us. Take the cures and pass them on. Please.
