When I heard the word “cure”

I’ve been sitting on a thought for a few days now. It’s difficult to not sit on a thought when someone says “cure” and meaningful human results within a year.

Actually, I had several thoughts.

The first thing that came to my mind is, these are cancer drugs, and I have thought for a long long long time that if I ever got cancer I wouldn’t do anything about it because the drugs they put me on would kill me long before the cancer did. That’s my thought on cancer and it’s “cures”. But now, there’s the thought of cancer drugs that would kill me before cancer would, curing diabetes.

Ever since I got diabetes, I’ve hoped for a cure. I’ve believed that there will be a cure in my lifetime. It is the hope for a cure for diabetes that drives me. It is the hope for a cure for diabetes that gives me reason to live. It is the thought that one day I won’t have this disease anymore that keeps me going.

By the same token, I have to be cautious of the word cure. The word cure makes me happy and giddy but thus far I don’t have a cure, I just have hopes of a cure. I hear things, things like “possible cure” and then it dies…and it’s a while before I think about it, and when I do think about I discover that it didn’t make it to human trials or it died in human trials. That word cure, it’s a dangerous word.

But then I thought of something bigger.

Say this possible cure, is a cure, the cure. Say, that regardless of the massive risks one of these drugs has, I get cured. That’s good, I’m cured. I’ll be happier than one can imagine, I’ll be rejoicing. But what about all the peeps in 3rd world countries with Type 1 diabetes. Will they have access to the cure? They don’t even have access to the normal stuff we diabetics need to survive, like insulin, will a cure just become another novelty item they can’t afford?

And then I started wondering about why they started testing cancer drugs in mice as a cure for diabetes. But I haven’t done anything with that thought. Although, it does seem strange to me that cancer drugs that block receptors of a tyrosine kinase which is not known to be involved in diabetes can possibly cure diabetes. It doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t compute. It’s like someone just woke up one morning and said, “hey! let’s try this.”

This is something that I’ll be researching, because I’m very curious now. Most cures I just kind of wave off and say when it happens it happens, but this time, I want to know why. I want to know what led them down this path. I want to know what made them think to try a cancer drug on a diabetic mouse.