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The NOW COQUITLAM, PORT COQUITLAM, PORT MOODY, ANMORE AND BELCARRA
Friday, January 4, 2013
Opinion About Us THE NOW is published by the Coquitlam Now, a division of LMP Publication Ltd. Partnership.
GLACIER MEDIA GROUP Our offices are located at 201A-3430 Brighton Avenue, Burnaby, British Columbia, V5A 3H4 Regional Publisher Brad Alden Publisher Derrick Chamberlain Editor Leneen Robb Sports Editor Dan Olson
Community rallies to find dog tried to catch her. On New Year’s Eve around midnight, our elderly They even went back to their neighbourhood to dog Bonza (freaked out by the fireworks) slipped out continue looking. of the house, jumped the fence and ran off into the We also have the deepest gratitude to the many cold night. people to whom we gave our phone number and who We would like to thank the many people who gave us encouragement and their own helped us to find our much-loved pet: stories of lost dogs found. • Madeline from the Coquitlam enginThank you from the bottom of our eering department, who gave much good hearts for the safe return of our beloved advice and encouragement; Bonza! • Sarah from the Coquitlam Animal To The Editor Lorna and Phil Campeau Shelter, who, even though the unit was Coquitlam closed, helped me and again gave good advice as to what to do; • Our friends Bonny and Gary, who searched along with us in the cold night and; • Most especially, Janice and her daughter, who through a total fluke happened to be in Mundy Park at a time that they would never have normally been there and gave us the information that they had seen Bonza miles away on Gatensbury hours before and
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Our View
Those in need still need your help
B
y now the aspirin has kicked in and, as everyone returns to the post-holiday workaday routine, reality is beginning to ooze back into the social consciousness. Boxing Day (or “Boxing Week”) sales have left their impact on our pocketbooks and bank cards. End-of-year and New Year’s Eve celebrations have run their course. Christmas is once again something to look forward to months down the road. All the revelry of the past week or so is getting lost in the need to get back at the daily grind and the inevitable cold January weather. All those comfortable thoughts of giving selflessly and joy-to-the-world warmth are beginning to melt under the hot realization that Santa has yet one more round of deliveries to make: the yuletide will soon wash your credit card statements into your mailbox, e or snail. For many folks, the time to pay the piper is drawing nigh — and the price the piper is demanding may come as a bit (or perhaps a lot) of a shock. Many people will be working hard over the next weeks or months just to catch up with the bills they rang up over the final weeks (or months) of the past year. The fallout from the upcoming season of bill-paying goes back to some of the selflessness so many of us felt during the preceding season of bill-making. Many of the people who needed our help to keep the figurative lights shining through the literally darkest part of the year still need our help. The destitute whom we helped lift out of the morass of economic and emotional need through December will quickly sink back down if we don’t continue to help the local food banks and other relief organizations. This is a cold time of year, not just because the days are short and our part of the Earth is tilted away from the sun. We’ve got to try to keep the warmth of Christmas burning a little longer. Giving will feel just as good today as it did one month ago.
Perspective
Our modern lives resemble a sci-fi movie N ow that we are a few days into the new year, The most important device, an insulin pump, is often mistaken for a cellphone or old MP3 player. all the talk about what happened in 2012 is Based on information that I input into the device, it coming to a close. Quite a bit has changed tells me how much insulin I need to take to keep my with the introduction of new smartphones, tablets blood glucose in a normal range, but it also delivers and some law changes. Some might say it’s like a a smaller amount of insulin that I need throughout whole new world. However, it’s definitely still recogthe entire day automatically. Overall, I nizable from the year before compared do not have to think about my health to, for example, 100 years ago. very much during the day. If you think Over the holidays, I visited the that that sounds impressive, be prepared Burnaby Village Museum, which is honfor the upcoming artificial pancreases ouring the carousel’s 100th anniversary. that will do everything I need to stay The single-level houses that desperately healthy except minor maintenance on lacked insulation, black wood-burning the machine and its accessories. stoves that were used for more than just Back in the early 1900s, a diabetic’s cooking, and confusing box-shaped teleMy Generation life was nowhere near as optimistic phones that did not possess telephone numbers all make our modern society Courtenay Huffman looking as life is for the approximately 26,000 Canadian youth who live with look like a scene from the latest sci-fi type 1 diabetes today. movie. Insulin, the medication that controls the elevated Something that stood out to me in the replica blood glucose levels of diabetics, was not discovered town was the drugstore. Apart from the sterile until the 1940s so the treatment of the disease was white interior and pharmacists dressed in starched very different. white lab coats, weaving through isles of colourfully Back then, a person would starve themselves to labelled bottles of drugs we see in today’s drugstores, keep their blood glucose levels down. The motto of something was missing. My small army of medical one doctor from the time was, “To starve is to sursupplies was nowhere to be seen. vive.” As a type 1 diabetic, I have never been without my Contrary to what you would think, this increased various devices going wherever I went, even if they a person’s life expectancy. Even then, they were are out of sight from everyone else’s eyes.
lucky to live for another decade, since most of them lived no longer than nine years after getting a diagnosis. Based on my experience before being diagnosed, that extreme lifestyle seems like something nearly impossible to maintain. I would eat an endless amount of food, always wanting more, yet I was severely underweight because my body was unable to utilize most of the nutrients. If I was asked to starve myself like the diabetics in the early 1900s, I would have never been able to succeed. If each of us looks back 100 years ago, each of us would be able to find something that we think we couldn’t live without missing. Whether it’s a medical device like me, your new smartphone or even just the insulation in your walls, everybody has a reason to be thankful for how much our world has developed recently. As a challenge for everyone during the upcoming year, let’s try to do something that, in 100 years, people will look back on and wonder how we survived without it.
Courtenay Huffman is a student at Dr. Charles Best Secondary in Coquitlam.