Happy Birthday!

I have a disease.

I didn’t get it by having unprotected sex.

I didn’t contract it from travels abroad.

I didn’t get it by eating a poor diet.

I didn’t get it by not exercising.

I have specific indicators, or makers, that, when triggered by something like a virus, a trauma, an infection, or any other number of scenarios, caused my immune system to get confused.

In that confusion, my immune system mistook the Islets of Langerhans, also known as the “beta cells” in my pancreas for germs and killed them.

The Islets of Langerhans make insulin.

Insulin breaks down sugars in the blood to use as fuel.  It also stores fat for future fuel reserves.

Without insulin, I would die.

100 years ago, the disease I have was a certain death sentence.  There was no beating it.  If your immune system turned on those beta cells, you died.  Your body literally ate itself trying to find fuel to make your body run.

What is this awful disease?

Type One Diabetes.

There are many types of diabetes.  The most common kind is type two diabetes.  Of all the people that have “diabetes” in the entire world, only 5-10% of them have Type One Diabetes.

You likely didn’t know that.

If you watch TV and they are talking about preventing diabetes, they are not talking about me.  Mine is unpreventable.

When they talk about diet and exercise reversing symptoms or helping the body to produce and utilize insulin more effectively, again…they are not talking about me, or any other person with the same disease as me.

I wear an insulin pump.  Yes, my pancreas is run on an AAA battery.  I have to have infusions of insulin 24/7 or I will not survive.

In 1923, Dr. Banting and his team won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for developing Insulin Therapy.  As they tested the insulin on patients that were lying in comas, one by one, they woke up from what would have been breaths away from death, had they not received their injections.

It is impossible to express enough gratitude to this man and his colleagues for the millions of lives he has saved.  ALL types of diabetes benefit from this discovery, as all types can require insulin, dependent upon the severity of the case.  ALL Type One Diabetics require insulin therapy to survive.

In 5 years, it will mark 100 years since the beginning of treatment that allowed us to survive a disease that, more commonly than not, is diagnosed between infancy through the early twenties…..although it is possible to be diagnosed at ANY age.

Dr. Banting genuinely cared about this treatment being available to all, rich or poor.  He sold the patent to a nearby university to study and manufacture the drug for somewhere between 50 cents to $1 (records on this are debatable, but it is agreed that it was minimal).

The university acquired the aid of Eli Lilly to mass produce insulin.

Today, Eli Lilly is the largest manufacturer of insulin, along with two other companies: Novo Nordisk and Sanofi.

These three companies have not shared Dr. Banting’s vision of insulin being accessible to all.  They have altered the drug just enough to extend patents on insulin for decades, all the while, raising the cost of insulin at alarming rates…together…in a pattern that is financially crippling to diabetics.

Here is a chart that shows how bad it really has become.  This is a similar type of insulin and the prices that were set by Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk.  There is supposed to be a blue line and a red line.  Honestly, It would have been better if it blended into a single purple line when the timing and cost of the spikes occurred at the same time.  Both companies claim that they each made their decisions independently.  You decide if you believe them:

Today is November 14^th.  Today is Dr. Banting’s birthday.  We celebrate his life every year as World Diabetes Day.  We celebrate what medicine can be and the hope that he and his colleagues gave us.  Though we have a fight against the evil (and I do not use this word lightly, as I am in the middle of this and witness every, single day the atrocity of price gouging a life-saving drug that requires daily use over a life time), we would not be here were it not for this team of professionals that cared more about the patients that were dying and saving lives than anything else.

Thank you, Dr. Banting.  Thank you for my life.  Thank you for the lives of my friends who struggle with this horrible disease every day.  To have hope, to have the chance of one day being cured, it only happened because you took away the immediate threat.

Now, we need the next step.  We need to stop the immune system from attacking our beta cells.  We need a cure so our OWN bodies can make insulin again, as it should.

We need a cure.

It is the only way we can reverse this.  Nothing else can do it…only a cure.

Happy Birthday, Sir Frederick Grant Banting!

We love you!