Amidst the candles, the dreidels, the latkes (potato pancakes), gifts, and gelt (either real money or foil-covered chocolate coins), there is the maggid (story). The story of a people, oppressed by a new king who wishes them to assimilate into a different religion and culture (or to assimilate more fully into that culture), a king who defiles the holiest of holy sites, families of resistance fighters who perish -- completely -- in the quest to keep one's lifestyle and beliefs alive, and a small, hermetically-sealed bottle of oil which -- miraculously -- burned for eight days, a full week longer than it should have, enough time for its replacement to be made. Ness gadol haya sham -- a great miracle happened there.

In every great tale, there are goals and sacrifices, heroes, villains, and miracles to be found at the last possible moment. For some, the miracle comes in a small, sealed bottle of aromatic fluid which, sparingly used, brings life to the dying, light to the darkness, hope to the hopeless.

For many of this site's regulars, that aromatic fluid is prescribed by the priests of physical preservation, administered by the apothecaries (from alchemists' achievements), and righteously rationed by the registrars of reckoning. Rather than sanctified oil, that fluid is insulin.

We've all heard the saga of Doctors Banting, Best, and Macleod. While not a traditional hero tale or Biblical parable, we read it as one -- because our lives depend upon it. The discovery and distillation of insulin was as much a miracle to people diagnosed with diabetes in the years immediately following as was the Maccabees' victory over the armies of Antiochus, the deliverance of the Israelites from Egypt, or the birth, death, and resurrection of a certain carpenter's Son.

I've oft said that every man's (and woman's) life is a hero cycle, with brief periods of challenge leading to difficult and dangerous tasks and, eventually, a period of bright success -- sometimes even glory and reknown. And so it is with each of us. We watch the inspirational videos, read on the dLife forums, and in the community, the hero tales of each other's lives -- struggling to survive and be free in the face of an often demanding taskmaster. We read of the victories, large and small, of each of us in the war against Diabetes. Some of them even involve having to stretch the contents of a single, small bottle of fluid until its successor can be purchased, claimed from insurance, or begged from a doctor's stock of pharmaceutical samples. There are miracles everywhere we look. And heroes. And Everyman.

Diabetes is just one of the demons we have to fight from time to time.