2008 Ride to Cure Diabetes: Asheville, N.C.

I'm posting here the text of an e-mail I sent today. Thanks for reading!

Dear friends -

Well, I'm planning for two events at the moment: (1) the impending birth of my second child (only a few days away, probably), and (2) the 2008 Ride to Cure Diabetes - Saturday, August 9, 2008, in beautiful Asheville, North Carolina, in the Great Smoky Mountains.

You can help with the second! Please donate to my ride here, and please forward this e-mail to anyone who might help.

This event, and this cause, are all about numbers. Back in January, I marked five years since being diagnosed with what is now my constant companion, type-1 diabetes. That's a pretty sobering anniversary. For a diabetic on a regime of multiple (5 or 6) daily injections, that would add up to more than 9,000 injections. Ouch! With my insulin pump, it's a slightly different story, though that also involves needles of unsettling length, and a plastic catheter inserted under my skin 24 hours a day. I test my blood an average of ten to twelve times a day, which means almost 20,000 finger or arm sticks in that time.

So that's the bad news. But the Ride to Cure Diabetes is about good news, too, like the fact that human safety trials have now begun on a vaccine for type-1 diabetes. (As a Pittsburgher, I'm especially pleased that this work is being done right here at Children's Hospital.) The vaccine has so far proved effective in mice. Among the type-1 community, people feel like the question of a cure or vaccine is not "if," but "when" - all the more reason why it is vital to speed up this research as much as possible.

Because the research is as much about the as-yet-invisible diabetics - that is to say, people who haven't yet developed the disease - as it is people like me. Consider the story of a different disease, polio, that eventually got a vaccine.

50 years ago, a doctor also working at the University of Pittsburgh, Jonas Salk, was trying to cure a disease that struck disproportionately at children. As a result of his work, that disease has now been completely eradicated from the United States and mostly eradicated in the rest of the world. But of course there are still survivors. Recently, I happened to read a tragic story about a woman who died after living most of her life in an iron lung, after being stricken with polio in 1952 as a three-year-old child. She missed the polio vaccine by three years.

That's what the JDRF's work is about. We don't want to have to say to a child, "Sorry, kid, you got diabetes a few months too early and missed the vaccine." When you donate to JDRF, you help save a child - maybe my son, Benjy (who has a relatively high risk for developing the disease), or soon-to-arrive daughter, or maybe someone you don't even know - from falling into this "just missed" category. And in addition to the promising vaccine research, the JDRF is making good progress on a cure for those of us who already have diabetes.

Again, you can donate by going here to the JDRF's secure web page, or I will gladly accept checks made out to "JDRF." You can mail them to me at 5734 Northumberland St., Pittsburgh, PA 15217. And, of course, all donations are tax deductible, and you will receive a receipt from the JDRF confirming that.

Thank you in advance. For those of you who have donated before, as so many of you have, I cannot thank you enough for your generous past support. It makes the miles on my bike feel like nothing at all.

Matt