Got insulin? It does a body good!

Day 3 of Diabetes Awareness Month and I have something to tell you. I like insulin. In fact I love insulin. You probably do too, and you don’t even know it. Ah, who am I kidding? Anyone who reads this blog knows all too well all about insulin. But just in case some poor misguided creature stumbles upon this post, I’ll elaborate.

Every body starts off with a pancreas which makes the hormone called insulin. Insulin helps to convert the food you eat into the energy that you need. Every day, a fully functional pancreas will perfectly do just that. Mine does, so does Sean’s and Mike’s and Sly’s. But not Alex’s. Alex’s pancreas is defunct. Up until early 2008 it used to be funct but now, no longer.

As far as organs go, the pancreas – when it’s working – is a superstar, and an ugly one at that. It's the Steven Tyler of body organs. In truth, I think it kind of looks like a turd. Yes, that’s it, a shitty turd; at least Alex’s is certainly that.

But it’s the insulin that is critical to one’s existence. And because Alex’s pancreas, defunct as it is, doesn’t make insulin we have to get it into her body some other way.

Manufactured insulin is the genius of two individuals; Drs. Frederick Banting and Charles Best. It was 1922, and the two docs, with a whole host of others, teamed up to discover the miracle that is insulin. It’s a long, interesting story, but I won’t tell it here but you can find it here. Suffice to say that the pair were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine for their discovery, and they have my eternal gratitude.

Insulin was basic, back then; it only came in a single flavor. Now we have several different kinds; fast acting, short acting, long acting, intermediate acting, and combination of two. Some parents, incredibly talented mixologists, take it a step further and combine three different kinds of insulin at once, to minimize the number of shots their child must take in a day.

 

The fully functioning pancreas is amazing; it knows exactly how much insulin to spurt out in response to the food a person consumes, and it knows exactly when to spurt it out, too. All foods digest differently and the pancreas knows this. Me, as the pancreas-by- proxy, doesn’t do anywhere near as good a job. Even though we can approximately calculate how much insulin Alex might need under a given scenario, it’s still a crapshoot.

Insulin has saved many, many people since 1922; before that, they died a slow – an agonizingly slow – death. Starved of food, robbed of energy, truly skin and bones. Don’t believe it? Get a load of these before and after pictures of a child diagnosed with type 1 diabetes and then a few months after beginning insulin injections.

 

Incredible isn’t it?

And it’s pretty much like that for our children, too. The transformation is awesome.

Back then, insulin injections were done using a reusable syringe that had to be sterilized by boiling, and occasionally sharpened by hand with a whetstone. The needle was terrifyingly long. I can’t imagine how many children with type 1 cried at the sight of it, and how many parents inwardly wept every time they had to hurt their baby with another shot of this precious liquid that would keep them alive.

Today, we have much better delivery devices. Insulin syringes come with needle tips that range in size from 5/16” (or 8mm) to 1/2" (or 12.7 mm). For people who use insulin pens – handy devices that hold a cartridge filled with insulin and have disposable pen caps –the needle size is even smaller, only 3/16” (or 5 mm). They still hurt, of course,  how could they not? But far less than the syringes of yore.

Alex started off with syringes – in the “business” we call it MDI for Multiple Daily Injections. Now, she uses an insulin pump, a battery-driven, life-saving, incredibly expensive, incredibly wonderful little computer.

For a type 1 diabetic person, it’s their life support system.

About the size of a cell phone, the insulin pump connects to Alex’s body through a long, skinny plastic tube, at the end of which is a tiny cannula that is inserted just beneath her skin. Insulin flows from the cartridge stored within the pump’s housing, at an amount and rate set by the individual, in this case, me. Alex knows better than to fiddle with the settings, because just as insulin gives her life, it can take it away just that quickly. But I won’t go there just now.

The insulin pump has been around for years, but manufacturers are working hard to make it as small and efficient as possible. Some of the newest ones are now tubeless. Alex’s Ping is not tubeless but it is remote controlled. How cool is that?

Way cooler than this, right?

 

That’s an insulin pump, circa mid 1960s, held about a gallon of insulin. We’ve come a long, long way.

This blog post has dragged on long enough; obviously I can’t say enough about the miracle of insulin. But I will leave today’s post with a final few words:

Insulin Is Not A Cure!!!