I find that unless you are a t1 yourself, it will always be hard to truly understand. I find the hardest is from my family, they care and love me and try to understand but don't really get it!
Yes indeed. Very few people who don't have T1 have any idea how hard it is.
I was only diagnosed 9 months ago, had the Libre 2 within 10 days, yes I know 'in the olden days we had to catch and kill our own insulin' etc. ...
But even with Libre, the burden is overwhelming. Every hour of every day for the rest of our lives; life sentence with no time off for good behaviour.
And, with the greatest respect to Bruce, the mental burden is not nearly well-recognised enough, and there is not nearly enough support for it.
As for a cure: pff. I've seen nothing remotely resembling progress toward a cure.
Better treatments? Hybrid closed-loop systems hugely reduce the burden, but it doesn't look as though the NHS is going to make HCL available to those of us who suffer psychologically rather than physically. It looks as though the NICE recommendations will be: If you're happy as Larry but your HbA1c is lousy, you should be offered HCL. If you're really suffering from the mental burden but your HbA1c ok, tough.
Will there be anything better than HCL? From what I've read, that whole approach has technical limits. You can't stick a glucose monitor in someone's blood or stick an insulin pump in someone's blood-- safety problems; but, if your glucose monitor is in your interstitial fluid and your insulin pump is in your subcutaneous tissue, the delays are such that you'll never get past 'hybrid'. You'll always have to 'pre-announce' meals and exercise, and you'll always have to be standing ready to intervene because the system can't always react fast enough.
There is one area of research I like the look of-- 'glucose-responsive insulin'. (See for example
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8158166/ .)
Scientists studying the insulin molecule noticed that, as it approaches the insulin receptor on a cell, in order to do its job, the insulin molecule slightly changes its shape: kind of slightly opening its 'arms' in order to latch onto the receptor.
So somebody had a brilliant idea: What if we could splice into the insulin molecule something like handcuffs? (The boffins prefer to call it a 'switch' or 'hinge'.) A molecule that would 'lock' when glucose concentrations in the blood were below a certain level, and would 'unlock' when BG was above a certain level?
If this could be done, you could just inject a shedload of this stuff once a day-- or maybe even have some sort of implant-- because it would only become active when and for as much as you needed it, and would immediately be deactivated as soon as you didn't need it.
I love this idea; I love it when someone comes at a problem from a completely different angle. Oh, and here are some pretty pictures of the insulin molecule!
https://pdb101.rcsb.org/motm/194 .
Anyway, in the meantime, what can we do? ... Just try to keep going; try to keep from going blind and getting our feet chopped off while also staying sane, or thereabouts. ; ) And staying sane or thereabouts does require ventilating when we need to, so don't ever feel bad about that! Very best wishes.
