The saga of my pancreas..feet..microbiome ..blood.. liver - part 1

Well, this just keeps going - on and on and on.  I thought I would be able to write a post when it was all done.  But clearly not.  So below is part 1 of an ongoing tale about me - my microbiome - my pancreas - my feet - my liver - my blood - and more.

Medical Record from my being admitted to
the hospital in 1984.

This particular saga started - I guess - in 1984.  That was when, at 15 years old, I came pretty close to dying before being diagnosed with type I diabetes.

My immune system had betrayed me by killing the beta cells in my pancreas. Thanks a lot immune system. Anyway - this is not supposed to be a post about diabetes. So - flash forward to a few weeks ago. Diabetes for almost 30 years and no major complications to note. Many annoyances. Some minor complications. But overall, I am doing OK.  Obsessive checking of my blood sugar and trying to keep my sugar in control and trying to regularly exercise seems to have kept the diabetes gods appeased. Eyes generally always have looked good. Feet HAD always checked out. Kidneys always seemed good.  Knock on wood - all was as good as I could hope for.

But then ... something came up.  A month and a half or so ago I kept noticing this funny feeling on the bottom of my right foot. Near the toes. Exactly the same kind of feeling one gets when one has a bandaid or tape stuck to my foot (which, given I have two kids both of whom put bandaids on every minor scratch and then leave them lying all over the house and our pool deck - is not too rare).  I thought - maybe the feeling will go away. But it didn't. It was lurking there. And after a week or so I decided I should get my doctor to check it out. So I put in an electronic request for an appointment on 7/21:

American Gut Project: Food, crowd sourcing, citizen science, open science, and MICROBES - what could be better?

A press release just came out announcing the American Gut Project: New public gut bacteria study expected to reach around world | University of Colorado Boulder.  From Rob Knight, Jeff Leach and others this project aims to engage the public in a large scale study of the connection between diet and the human gut microbiome.  Read more about it in the press release and I am sure more will come out soon.  Full disclosure - I have agreed to be a collaborator on the project - though as a fully open project I think pretty much anyone could be a collaborator.  Anyone this is definitely worth checking out.

As an aside - this is not the only crowd sourcing microbiome project out there.  I just became aware of another one called uBiome and I am working on getting a guest blog post from the organizers.  The American Gut project has got dozens of the major players in microbiome research involved.  And with Rob Knight being one of the key players one can expect it to big, cutting edge things.  Not sure about the scope / plans of uBiome but hopefully we will find out more soon.