Diabetes detritus
I’ve just had a brilliant idea that will, without any doubt, benefit the entire international diabetic community! It’s so good, in fact, that if I wasn’t so dedicated to the good of the common weal, I would be heading down to the UK Patent Office right now to claim exclusive 20-year rights.
There are two parts to my idea. Part one – diabetics frequently refer to themselves as being members of a giant club, a brotherhood if you will, of pancreatically challenged hoards who share a common bond of insulin dependency.
Part two – the outward-bound freaks amongst you may have heard of GeoCaching. Basically, people hide Tupperware boxes of trinkets around the countryside and publish the latitude and longitude of said boxes on the Intermaweb. Armed with your trusty GPS, you can then head out into the wilds, find said box, add a trinket, take a trinket and move on.
It sounds a rubbish waste of time, but it’s actually quite fun (honestly). Through it you can find new places you might not have visited before and there are a huge number of caches around the world.
So, here’s the idea – we combine Part One and Part Two! As a local diabetic you firstly bury a box of spares – needles, Fruit Pastilles, lancets, a few test strips – under a tree, or behind a loose brick in a city wall. You then log on to a special website only diabetics can access. Allowing access would be simple, you would just have password challenge question like “What was your last Hb1AC?” Diabetics will instantly know the answer, while non-diabetics will be left bemused. Once on the website you would log the position of your cache.
Now, imagine another diabetic comes to visit your town and, shock, they run out of lancets. They simply dial into the website using their mobile phone and are directed to the nearest cache of spares via GPS. Everyone’s got Internet and GPS-enabled phones, yeah?
With this system in place, worries about running out of cannulas, strips and needles would become a thing of the past and the world would thus become a happier, better, utopian place.
So to kick off, I’ve just left a cache of lancets behind the statue of Robert Dundas, 2nd Viscount Melville, in the street outside my office; anyone visiting Edinburgh at the minute for the International Festival can help themselves.
I think you’ll all agree it’s a scheme that is completely and utterly without any feasible flaws or problems at all. Go me – I await my knighthood from a grateful world.
Tim! This is FANTASTIC!!!!! I think you’re onto something here! We’d need a way to keep muggles (is that what they’re called?) out of our stash. Like a key control that needs but a single drop of insulin to open it.
Yes! That would work a treat – couldn’t be too difficult to do either…!
If only this had been in place when I was in Koh Samui in May and ran out of insertion kits!!
I like this idea. Did you store them in a little box or something ?
I might go have a nose for them next week, I won’t move/take them though … they’re different to the kind I use :]
As Scott suggested – they’re in a little box that can only be opened with a splash of insulin. I’ve hidden it just under Earl Dundas’ hat…
Tim,
Sorry to disappoint you man, but I do this already in the US. I generally leave something related to Team Type 1 and use an old test strip container as the container itself or in a bigger container. But you know the old saying – Great minds think alike. So I hope that someone is telling you that you have a great mind.
@tj Aaargh! How disappointing! Oh well, back to the drawing board – I’ll have to invent something else to become of the savour of global diabetics.