My pump, Chello, and I are looking for something special to do to celebrate her first birthday (of course, that means the day I started "using" her...). It's on Monday, Nov. 30th.
Any suggestions?
Happy Birthday Chello. Congratulations Nads. Sorry I dont have any suggestions but I'm sure you will do something special.
You could buy her some kind of pump accessory like a new clip or case. Better still, I would see if I could keep my blood sugars in range all day long. That would probably honor her most and show her just how much you appreciate what she's done for you... or, should I say, helped you do for yourself. Being on the pump the first year is the most difficult and you both deserve to be congratulated. It gets easier after the first year.
Thanks to both of you, both for your kind wishes and suggestions (Paul)!
I like the idea of getting her a birthday present. Maybe make her a card, reflecting on the last year with her. Let her know how much you appreciate her. You could throw her a party, and invite some pumping friends, if you have them. I imagine it would be a little lonely being the only pump around (kinda like being the only diabetic around...)
And congratulations on your first year pumping! May you have many, many more.
Hmmm... I like the card idea... I think I will do that, and take my time writing my thoughts down. Don't tell Chello, but it will actually be more me celebrating than her! I will put the card away until her birthday next year, and then maybe add some more to it then. Who know, ten years from now, it may be a novel! Then again, I hope to be able to set it on fire before ten years and never have to look at it again...!
Thanks so much Ajax!
~ very long ~
3 cheers for the noteworthy.
Hey thanks for the Banting and Best reference, no one can argue that their genius deserves a standing ovation from us, however if it wasn’t for Collip they would never have been able to isolate a useable form of insulin, furthermore, there was no way for such a small team to make enough insulin for 50 patients, let alone the immediate population of folks who were dying. So while idea guys are fantastic – (IMO) so are the many behind the scene people who turn ideas into products. Has anyone ever really thought about what it takes to make the insulin they depend on?
“It’s mostly water” bet you thought that was coming! Okay so you fill a container with water…. NO. pure water is crucial. Water is also known as the universal solvent because both polar and non-polar solutes can easily dissolve into water. Plus BUGS can live in water. So how do you make pure water? It’s easy in concept, but really hard in practice because even if you made sterile, absolutely pure H2O it would immediately suck minerals from the air and even the pipes that carry it around. “Pure” water goes bad faster than milk left out of the refrigerator. Water is used in every single step, in all of the buffers and solutions, as transport, wash, fill, purification and then process decontamination after the batches have run.
Grinding up old pig pancreases in a pot adding chemicals to extract insulin protein chains, and then purification of those chemicals works pretty good, add a little fish semen and you have good ol’ pork NPH insulin (I am NOT making this up). Recombinant DNA protein chains, the kind that most closely matches human insulin, aren’t made that way. In fact rDNA origin chains are “cloned” (the same controversial technology you hear about in the news by semi- and complete idiots) by bacteria, sometimes engineered yeast cells, and sometimes from mammalian cells in huge soupy batches. You “fool” them, they take the “bait” protein chain and then reproduce by the zillions, also replicating 1 strand of your “bait” chain every time they split. The result is an enormous mess of good stuff and bad stuff all linked together in a form you cannot use at all.
Then you have to smash the carrier cells, into gazillions of particles. Smashing is done chemically, or sometimes by precision radiation of energy. These particles contain fragments of the original “bug” pieces AND fragments of the specific protein chain you want. The purification of this mess is as complicated as you might imagine. Using technology like filtration and more complicated processes like chromatography you slowly gather up your precious pieces. Further processing is sometimes required so the little fragments “find” each other and bond into longer, pure, protein chains.
All of this happens in sterile, controlled, monitored environments, so delicate that a single degree of variation could ruin or contaminate your whole batch. In the States, every single step is measured, documented, controlled, tracked, tested, and archived in an attempt to avoid contamination of any parameter critical to quality. Even the kind of pen you use to write down the date on a manual batch sheet form is controlled.
Every single step, including bottling, capping, labeling, storage, and trucking to distribution is tracked and is accountable by documentation. The documentation is archived and is considered “auditable” (it’s also a legal document) If you didn’t do the math, there are over 1000 individuals responsible by the time that vial of insulin reaches your refrigerator, and any one of those steps can ruin a bottle of insulin. I applaud Banting, Best, Mcleod and Collip, but there are so many more out there who never get recognized.
Poor, poor, Paulescu.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolae_Paulescu
As much as I love the gang from Toronto (my resident city), they goofed on a few translations of Paulescu's work, who had actually already discovered insulin. :)
Unfortunately Paulescu gets little to no recognition for the discovery of insulin, so given this opportunity, I'd like to thank him as well as Banting and Best and everyone else involved.
I did my CAPP speech on Banting and Best in grade 10 :) It was really interesting to read about their experiments.
[quote user="Trevor"]
Poor, poor, Paulescu.
Unfortunately Paulescu gets little to no recognition for the discovery of insulin, so given this opportunity, I'd like to thank him as well as Banting and Best and everyone else involved.
[/quote]
Wow, I've honestly never heard of Paulescu. But now I'm confused. Who discovered insulin?
:S
there are schools where i live named after them!!! and i know that at least one of tthem does fundraising and has old newspaper articles hung all over the walls about diabetes and insulin and all that