2002 Thesis Project - "Life Support"

"While insulin allows a person to stay alive, it does not cure diabetes nor does it prevent its eventual and devastating effects: kidney failure, blindness, nerve damage, amputations, heart attack and stroke."* Diabetes is not just a disease where the pancreas no longer works, it effects the entire body. This chair encompasses the body just as diabetes does. This chair is constructed of 2,190 syringes, which is equivalent to a type 1 diabetic injecting insulin six times per day for one year. Many diabetics are now injecting insulin up to six times a day to further delay the onset of diabetes related complications.

I have been a type 1 diabetic since 1988 and I have since given myself approximately 23,725 injections of insulin. Diabetes is regarded by many as being a controllable disease and not the life threatening disease that it really is. According to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation there are more deaths from diabetes than AIDS and breast cancer combined.

* Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation