Revenge of the pissed off pancreas

Back when I was in high school (standard 7th or 8th, i think), I studied about various systems in human body – nervous system, digestive system, excretory system etc. The biology teacher made us draw all sorts of diagrams explaining these systems in detail. My favorite one was the digestive system. I liked drawing the esophagus and the large intestine. They looked like a couple of crumpled pipes lying around inside my tummy! And then, there was the stomach, the liver, the small intestine and so on. Somewhere near the stomach, I used to draw a silly looking organ called pancreas. It seemed like it was trying to hide from me, as if it was guilty of something really bad it was going to do. I never really understood what pancreas was supposed to do and no one cared to explain the function of this insignificant digestive system organ to me. Hell! I didn’t really care. I wasn’t interested in the stupid pancreas and wasn’t planning on becoming a doctor anyways! But, it seems my egotistical pancreas didn’t really appreciate my indifferent attitude and took it upon itself to make me understand its importance (and ofcourse get back on me .. that stupid egomaniac!). So, like a suicidal jehadi, it just blew itslef up and totally stopped working. That’s how it took its revenge on me. It took me a few months to realize this but by the time I became aware of the wrath of my pancreas, I had already lost 22 pounds and was spending a good part of my day drinking water and then immediately giving it back to the mother nature!
Well, now after 3 months of living with type I diabetes, I know a lot about what pancreas is and what role does it play in the diagram with those stupid crumpled pipes. The damn thing made its point very strongly and didn’t really leave a lot of choice for me. All I can do now is just hope that science soon finds out a way to coax our pissed off pancreas into starting functioning again. Lessons learnt – Respect thy pancreas, DO NOT piss it off!