What if I was diabetic?

Yes, the title is a tribute to the M&M simulation that we are going through this week. The candy and the phrases "Melts in your mouth, not in your hand" and also the line from Tommy Boy "Your brain has a thick candy shell.." suddenly have a new meaning to be attached to them for what could be the rest of my life when I eat an M&M. This is NOT an easy simulation on the days that I work!! Working at a hospital for 12 hours and constantly taking care of patients' needs can make anything else that has to get done extremely difficult. The days that I have off it seems to be no problem, and with time at work I have been keeping to my schedule. I also meant the title line to have a little bit of irony because it doesn't say "What if I was HIV positive?". Recently at work I have just missed a few people who have visited the hospital and were involved in community based AIDS programs. The first one was a minister who lived in the Baltimore area and ran a house for people to live at, with the catch being they were all HIV positive. The second was a woman who worked at a home for small children with AIDS who have been abandoned. Both times I was taking care of other patients, and by the time I had heard about their involvement in the community it was already too late and they had left. All of this is leading up to the men's panel, which I am waiting with a great anticipation. Now please enjoy a wall of M&Ms on the way down to the "Did You Know? section....

DID YOU KNOW?

So in the light of our M&M simulation this week, I decided to look up the first HIV medication that was the one pill once a day to treat the drug. The article was first posted in 2006 in response to the FDA approval for the very first type of this drug. The drug is actually a combination of three different types of HIV medications and is known as Atripla (Zwillich, 2006). I think that as we are going through this simulation this week, we all should be able to appreciate just what this actually meant for people who had to go through the regiment every single day to take care of their bodies in the only way that was available to them. The three different drugs that are incorporated into this pill are the Sustiva and another already dual pill called Truvada, all three of these drugs are important in the bodies fight against HIV (Zwillich, 2006).

More information about this pill can be found either in the source referenced, or in this article from the NY Times posted at: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/09/health/09aids.html?_r=1

Source:

Zwillich, T. (2006). First One-Pill-a-Day Drug for AIDS. Retrieved from http://www.webmd.com/news/20060712/first-one-pill-a-day-drug-aids