25 years of diabetes – are we making any progress?

I couldn’t find a picture of a cake with “25” on it. Sorry.

When I was diagnosed with diabetes at the age of 4 in 1983 you put urine in a test tube and added some chemicals to make it change colour so you could get a rough idea of how much sugar was in your body. Blood testing strips were a huge step forward.

In 1989, at the age of 10 I moved from two injections a day with syringes onto this thing called a Novopen. It was a beautiful creation, like a top quality, brushed steel fountain pen but it contained insulin and had a needle on the end. It meant taking four injections a day, but it gave me flexibility – I had a full portion of fish and chips for the first time since my diagnosis. Previously, I wasn’t allowed so many carbs.

Over the years meters changed, I was delighted when the first five second meters came out – it used to take two minutes to get a blood test result, now it was almost instantaneous. My pen changed from the beautiful original to a bigger, cheaper, plastic model that I whinged ;