Having two boys with type one diabetes, has had a huge impact on our lives. My day is full of blood sugar tests, pump changes and alarms.
Type one diabetes is an autoimmune disease. This simply means that the bodies own immune system attacks the body and kills of cells. In type one diabetes, the immune system attacks the pancreas and kills of the insulin producing islets.
At this stage there is no known cure for type one diabetes. A person with it has to inject insulin every day. They are dependent on insulin to live. Even though they don't have any cure, there are advances been made to finding better ways to treat and live with diabetes.
Blood glucose monitoring is possible. We check the boys blood sugar level around 8-10 times a day. We can give insulin as needed through the pump. We can check if the boys have ketones in their blood. When Tom was diagnosed and in intensive care, they sent someone from the lab to collect blood to see what level ketones were at. It took time for them to tell us what level the ketones were. Now I put a strip in the blood meter and know within 10 seconds if either of my boys have ketones.
There is also continuous blood glucose monitoring and an artificial pancreas. We don't have these yet but they have changed the whole lifestyle of people living with type one diabetes.
These advances are great but still we pray for a cure for both our boys and all the other children (and adults) that suffer from type one diabetes. One of my hopes is to say one day, my boys use to have type one diabetes but now they have been cured. I will not support any organisation or group though that puts funds into embryonic stem cell research. This is immoral and has not shown any promise at all. I really don't believe we can get a cure with ESC. Adult stem cells have shown much more promise anyway.
You can read a few posts I have written against embryonic stem cell research at the following links:
