Sunday, April 1, 2012

Message in a Bottle

Today's Prompt: Health Time Capsule. Pretend you’re making a time capsule of you & your health focus that won’t be opened until 2112. What’s in it? What would people think of it when they found it?

I've never participated in putting together a time capsule. I remember, as a kid, hanging out at the city fire station where my dad worked and staring quizzically at the plaque on the city's time capsule that was there. I don't remember what date it was set to be opened. Just that I promised my x-year-old self that I would make a point to put it on my calendar so I could see what went in it. I'm pretty sure I missed its unveiling and I'm pretty sure I am okay with that.

That being said, I do wonder what a person with type 1 diabetes will be like in 2112, a hundred years from now. I know there is a large contingent of my community who believe that we will have eradicated the disease by then. The cure has been "five years out" for at least half a century already. I hope they're right. I hope that Diabetes is a story that people tell in a healthier future - a cautionary tale about immune systems gone haywire before the development of miraclefuntimeshappycure.

Either way, I'd want them to be able to touch and feel the implements of management from 2012. The bulky meters, the sharp lancets, the fragile syringe needles, the glass insulin bottles, the ARCHAIC pager-like insulin pumps that are 20 years behind other high tech personal devices. I'd want to give them a good laugh and a sharp poke.

I'd include my blog posts somehow. (Will they still be able to access our version of the web? Or a flash drive?) I'd share my diagnosis story - at once so personal and yet so typical - of symptoms, DKA, coma, education. I'd throw in some pictures of my kids (because they're hella cute).

If I could, I'd find a way to capture and encapsulate the stigma of diabetes in the early 21st century. The sneers, the judgments. I'd want them to know what the media did to hype and blame. Tell how health care practitioners did not educate themselves for the sake of their patients even under the threat of epidemic.

I'd share a sample of my blood sugars, my diet, my day-to-day life. And I'd tell them that I hope they live well. Better than us. That they know more than we did.

Maybe by then someone will have figured out how to accurately bolus for pizza.

2 comments:

  1. Haha, thanks for the laugh at the end - that darn pizza!!!

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  2. accurate bolusing - now that would be impressive.

    blessings to you from Angela (mom to two with t1 diabetes)

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