Last night, Aaron and I joined a group of friends at the beautiful Sun Theatre in Yarraville for a ‘cinematic experience’. Harking back to the ‘good ol’ days’, we saw a film shot in 70mm Ultra Panavision with an overture at the beginning, an intermission of exactly 13 minutes in the middle and a souvenir program to take home at the end. (We’ll ignore the fact that rather than watching Ben Hur, introduced by Bill ‘Golden Age of Hollywood’ Collins, we were watching Quentin Tarantino’s eighth movie, ‘Hateful Eight’ (H8ful Eight??? Hateful 8???)   with all the gore and violence – yet surprisingly still so much grace and beauty –  one has come to expect in a Tarantino film.)

Often, there is much chatter about the ‘good ol’ days’. I get it. It was a time where things seemed simpler: kids were kids, adults were adults and everyone knew where they belonged. Milk came in bottles with cream on top….And I walked ten miles to school and twenty miles home, all uphill.

We can look back nostalgically at different periods in history. And it’s funny how history repeats itself. I remember hearing my father telling me how lousy the 1980s music I loved was compared to the music he loved. And yet his favourite music – the Beatles, Frank Sinatra, Simon and Garfunkel – would have had the same said about them. I try to catch myself before I criticise the trash music daughter is listening to now, because I remember how annoying it was (and how distressed I was) when my dad criticised Morten Harket.

Last week, Aaron got into a Facebook discussion that started off being about music and somehow ended up not being about music. The person he was ‘speaking’ with was saying that everything was better in the ‘olden days’.

‘Everything?’ asked Aaron

‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘Everything!’ She then went on to explain what she included in her ‘everything’ – music, food, medicine…

He quickly jumped in and pointed out that thanks to advances in medicine, his wife is still around. The olden days were really not all that great for those living with a health condition such as type 1 diabetes.

Perhaps because I am a beneficiary of all that the ‘modern era’ has to offer, I have no nostalgia or desire to go back in time. Because for me, along with sentimental thoughts of kids playing in the streets until dusk – and playing meant being outside, not sitting in front of a console – and cooking meant making foods from scratch and a telephone call was something made from a phone with a chord, there would be the practicalities of boiling syringes and sharpening needles and an inability to accurately measure BGLs and a life without diabetes technology. Bygone era? No. Be gone!

I would take the modern era and all its so-called short comings in a heartbeat over the ancient era of medicine! Through our rose-coloured glasses we forget that there were days before vaccines and days when life expectancy was shorter. We forget that there were not tests or screening to identify different conditions, that mental health was rarely, if ever, discussed.  We forget that only 94 years ago – not that long ago – there was no medication to treat someone with type 1 diabetes.

So with all this in mind, read what is coming next. Here is an update on a couple of the many artificial pancreas projects happening today.

I want a cure as much as the next person. But in the meantime, keep the DTech coming. Please.