As of Saturday, March 6, at 10:40 AM, I am one step closer to having my robot pancreas. I have, through a combination of landing the best endocrinologist in the Kaiser system and being a persistently squeaky wheel, gotten my Medtronic Minimed Continuous Glucose Monitoring System. I am phenomenally excited about this development, and not...

Here’s something I don’t like: the idea that a piece of technology I rely on to keep me alive could somehow kill me. I’m speaking not of Toyotas, but of insulin pumps — according to this piece in the Wall Street Journal, “the Food and Drug Administration said Wednesday it has seen an increasing number of...

I was reading the other day about the amount of Federal Stimulus grant money still remaining. Given the large amount of money allocated in the past year for grants, it is not entirely surprising that a large amount remains up for grabs for enterprising grant applicants. The most interesting segment to me is the money still available via...

It came! My pump arrived, pretty in pink, and, yes, it was like Christmas. I transferred all my settings over, and I am now plugged in and running with the new Medtronic Minimed 522 Insulin Pump. As expected, the biggest difference between this pump and my old 515 is the color. The user interface, shape, buttons, and operations are all...

I just had a feature published in Popular Science that I think might be of interest to others with Type 1. As I’ve mentioned previously on this blog, right after being diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes 9 years ago, I enrolled in a trial for a new drug called an anti-CD3 monoclonal antibody (best known as teplizumab and being studied...

A Story of Adventure and Love in the Endocrine System Since 2005, I have been the appreciative owner of a Kaiser-subsidized Medtronic Minimed insulin pump, model 515. It has been good to me; it has accompanied me through sleet and through snow. We have flown together, tanned together, climbed together. We’ve never showered together,...

I just returned from a trip to Tokyo for work and am finally over my jet-lag and settling back into my old routine.  It was a crazy week: not much sleep, constantly walking, and encountering carb-laden foods wherever I turned. Soba noodles for breakfast, tempura with rice for lunch, dough-covered sweetened chestnuts for a snack —...

I just had a lovely dip down to 38 mg/dl, so when I first saw a headline indicating that scientists had figured out a way to derive insulin from safflowers, I thought it might be time for another glucose tablet. But now that my blood sugar has rebounded, I can confirm that I was not, in fact, hallucinating: according to Canada’s...

To most people, eight days in Hawaii sounds like a dream.  And while I’m not a sit-on-the-beach kind of person at all — in fact, I hate both the sun and salt water — I am currently one of those people.  My husband and I are on Kauai right now, and there are enough activities — from hiking the Na Pali Coast to...

This morning I was feeling inspired by the interview I did with JDRF’s Aaron Kowalski about the Artificial Pancreas Project,  so I did a little google searching about artificial pancreases.  I was looking for recent news, but instead I came across this article from the New York Times, published on December 7, 1999 — just...