Thank you, Madam Chair. I was told I have five minutes to make an impact, so here goes.
I've been living with type 1 diabetes for almost 46 years. Due to complications, I lost my eyesight when I was 30 years old. I'm completely blind. That's what this disease can cause: devastating complications—blindness, kidney failure, heart disease, and amputations.
Since I was diagnosed at the age of four, many advances have been made in the care and treatment of type 1 diabetes, or T1D. Those include the home glucose monitor; they weren't invented until I was a late teenager. There were two kinds of insulins when I was a kid: beef and pork, extracted from cows and pigs, plopped into vials, and injected pretty much in raw form. Today, we have synthetic insulins, very sophisticated insulins.
Even injection methods have come a long way. I used a glass syringe as a kid. It had to be sterilized in boiling water every morning, whereas today we have the insulin pen and the insulin pump. The tools that have been developed have helped those living with T1D today, but it's far from perfect. You see, there are a lot of factors influencing blood glucose control—factors outside our own control. Those include not only diet and exercise, but also illness, stress, and even hormones. So there is a lot of guesswork when it comes to insulin dose, and it can be very frustrating.
About 15 years ago I suffered from a condition called hypoglycemia unawareness. It's a condition in which you are no longer aware of your low blood glucose levels. The danger is that you could go into a coma at any time, with no awareness of this. Those days, we didn't have the continuous glucose monitors of today. I was testing obsessively then, not knowing whether my blood glucose levels were so high that they were damaging the organs of my body or, conversely, whether they were so low that I could be in a coma the next minute—I had no idea.
Desperate times called for desperate measures, and I applied for, and was accepted into, an experimental, world-renowned transplant program developed for those living with T1D, called the Edmonton Protocol. The team takes a donor pancreas from someone who has died and isolates the insulin-producing cells—the islet cells—from that pancreas. Those islet cells are then transplanted into the liver of someone living with T1D. Those islet cells then graft onto the liver and they get to work. They start to produce insulin.
I've had two islet-cell transplants, and I can tell you that they have saved my life. Since those transplants, I require little to no insulin, with perfect blood glucose control. Right here, right now, I have islet cells in my liver that are producing insulin. However, there are restrictions to the Edmonton Protocol. You see, to prevent rejection, you must take a daily dose of powerful immunosuppressive drugs for the rest of your life. Also, there is a lack of donors.
I am living proof that research in the field of type 1 diabetes is working. It's making a difference. But further research needs to be done, which brings us to the JDRF Canadian Clinical Trial Network and its focus in research on the care, management, and cure for type 1 diabetes.