For those who don't know me my immune system is possibly one of the most dysfunctional ones on planet earth. For starters, I'm deathly allergic to tree nuts. NOTE: not peanuts! And it is amazing how many people mix those up even after I've explained it multiple times. Peanuts are not nuts! They are legumes! If you're still confused, examples of tree nuts are almonds, walnuts, cashews, pistachios, etc. I'm so allergic to them that if I touch a walnut, then touch a chip, then eat said chip, I'll go into anaphylactic shock (aka your throat swells up, you stop breathing, and you die unless treated) ever wonder why on the back of candy bars it'll say something like manufactured on equipment that also processed tree nuts? Yeah that's for people like me.
And to add to all the fun, I'm also a recently diagnosed type 1 diabetic. Type 1 diabetes is an auto-immune disease. My immune system completely lost it and thinks my beta cells (the cells in your pancreas that make insulin) are pathogens.. So it started attacking them. Did I mention that beta cells aren't made throughout your life? The ones you are born with are the only ones you've got. So naturally, when all the innocent little beta cells get massacred, your body gets a bit screwed up. And by a bit I mean a lot. Without beta cells you can't make insulin, without insulin you can't take sugar into your cells. This results in ridiculously high blood sugar (normal is between 70-130... I was 395 when I was diagnosed and many people are higher). High blood sugar leads to all kinds of complications like liver and kidney damage, nausea, and even a horrible condition called DKA: diabetic ketoacidosis. VERY BAD! It's basically a high blood sugar induced coma and can be deadly. On the other hand if you take too much insulin your blood sugar will crash and go too low, which can also be deadly. So imagine you're walking on a tightrope. To your left is death from low blood sugar. To your right is death from high blood sugar. Tread carefully.
So now you've got a better idea of just how dysfunctional my immune system is. If you are confused by the somewhat medical description I just gave, try thinking about it another way. Lets imagine a peaceful summer day in suburbia. Cute little houses, beautiful gardens, kids playing the street. People planting flowers, mowing the lawn, enjoying some small talk with their neighbors over a picturesque picket fence. A nice little town. These people are beta cells, living in tranquil Pancreas Valley. Enjoying their lives, doing their jobs the best they could be expected to. How charming. Now you see a car drive down the road. Oh look it’s the Walnut family! Mr. and Mrs. Walnut are on vacation with their two children and family friend, Peter Pecan. Their being perfectly law-abiding, minding their own business, you know. Just taking in the scenic view. A police car takes a routine drive around the town. In the patrol car are two officers (white-blood cells), an old veteran and a rookie. They keep a weather eye out for any danger. The veteran is twitching, paranoid. The rookie spots a group of the notorious Rhinovirus gang loitering on a street corner, picking their next victims. He alerts his boss, who has his binoculars trained on a few beta cell children playing hopscotch in the street. His twitching has become more noticeable, he’s sweating nervously, and his fingers beat a tattoo onto his gun. “Never mind that!” he yells. “We’ve got a code red! Beta cells running rampant and an invasion from the sinister tree nut army! Call in back up!!” Soon the marines, the navy seals, SWAT teams, and every other branch of the military are on sight. Alarms are blaring, lights flash, panicking officers yell through megaphones. The beta cells try to put up a white flag, try to tell the immune-system military they’ve done nothing wrong. But it’s too late. Artillery fire rains down; bombs decimate houses, machine guns thunder into the night. The streets are awash with blood. Not a single beta cell or tree nut was left alive. The massacre is hushed up, and the country (body, AKA me) doesn’t realize what’s happened until blood sugars soar so high they have to call in international forces for medical treatment.
So there you have it. My immune system is like a paranoid veteran officer with a twitchy trigger-finger. This is what is known as “not healthy”. Why have I made this the topic of a blog post you ask? Because of the unique challenges presented by being an insulin-dependent diabetic in Africa-where there is no electricity with which to refrigerate insulin. When insulin goes over a certain temperature-I think it’s 70 degrees Fahrenheit-it gets denatured. AKA it doesn’t work. So you are supposed to keep insulin refrigerated until you start using it. After that it can stay at room temperature for a month, after which it expires. Keeping things refrigerated where there is little to no electricity is challenging to say in the least. For the insulin we carry around with us we have these awesome little things called Frio cold packs. You get them wet and they keep the insulin cold through evaporative cooling. Very handy. Then we have a ridiculous amount of extra insulin that we carry in a mini fridge in case the ones in the cold pack get messed up by someone leaving them out in the sun on safari-which I totally DIDN’T do… BUT WAIT! How do you power a mini fridge when there’s no electricity??
It’s complicated dear reader. We have four marine cycle batteries. Two are big and can run the fridge for about five days. However, one of these doesn’t work. It’s fully charged it just doesn’t power the fridge. No idea why. It’s given in to Africa and doesn’t work anymore, Surprise, surprise… And we have two little ones that can only run it for a few hours. AND we have a generator for recharging the batteries and running the fridge in times of emergency. Yesterday the big battery died. And the little batteries were packed away in trunks. And there was no gas for the generator. So what did we do you may ask? We hoped. Because there is nothing else you can do. T.I.A and all that. For a time period of maybe 10 hours, the fridge had no charge, we just kept it closed and hoped it would hold the cold in. By the time we got it running again the insulin was thankfully still cool. So everything is ok but I sincerely hope this is the last time that happens, because I don’t want to go into DKA hundreds of miles away from a sufficient hospital. I don’t see that being as much fun as a barrel of monkeys… Although I’ve never understood that phrase. Just what is so fun about a barrel of monkeys? Sounds like a disaster waiting to happen. Just like an insulin dependent diabetic with no electricity! Hmmm…. Maybe this is as much fun as a barrel of monkeys. Oh well I like monkeys... and challenges :)
P.S. To certain people at home whom I know are worrying because they read this: I’m fine and we bought two more batteries so that won’t happen again. Everything is OK :)
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