Non-Believer

A funny thing happened on the way back from the washroom.

It was almost a year ago that I was in Israel to visit my little sister. We have lots of wonderful memories of that trip but there is one that we laugh about every so often. It's the story of the bat shit crazy girl in the washroom.

I had to go. My sister didn't. So I headed into the public washroom at the mall and my sister waited outside. As I was washing my hands, a young woman came up to me, pointed to my insulin pump and started speaking in Hebrew. I quickly raised my hands in the air and told her, in English, that I only spoke English. She kept speaking excitedly, pointing to my pump, and saying the odd word I recognized like 'diabetes'.

Finally, I lead her out of the washroom, walked her over to my sister and said "what is she talking about??".

The girl explained to my sister that I had diabetes (yep, we knew that already) and that her father had a cure for diabetes. She wanted me to come with her right away so he could cure me.

All I could think was "I wonder if my sister knows the Hebrew word for 'cinnamon'? If not, she's about to learn it".

I told my sister to tell her that there was no cure for Type 1 diabetes but thank you very much for her interest. The girl kept insisting that I go with her. We kept insisting that I wasn't going with her. She finally smiled, shrugged as if to say 'your loss honey', and left.

We laughed all the way home at the craziness of it all, I mean if a man in Tel Aviv had the cure for type 1 diabetes, I wouldn't be hearing about it in a public washroom.

Bat. Shit. Crazy.

So you can imagine my surprise when I read yesterday about a researcher from the University of Ben Gurion in (you guessed it) Tel Aviv, who has come up with a promising treatment for type 1 diabetes. One that involves an anti-inflammatory drug treatment designed to help our damaged beta cells regain the ability to fight inflammation and protect them from our body's overactive immune responses.

B.S.C. girl in the washroom tries to drag me to see her father who had a cure for type 1 diabetes.

One year later I read about a man in the same city who has developed a promising treatment (I hesitate to use the 'c' word) for type 1 diabetes.

There is probably a picture up in his office of me right now with the words 'non-believer' written underneath.