TEDxDelMar - A Search For A Cure
Thursday, October 20, 2011 at 8:38AM Last Saturday I had the pleasure of attending TEDxDelMar in San Diego.
My friend Scott had told me about TED talks some time ago and if you don’t know what they are you can sum it up the way they have on their site.
Riveting talks by remarkable people, made free.
Many subject and ideas are discussed and I really encourage you to check some out. They really are fascinating.
TEDx is an individually organized TED event. Here is how they describe it.
Created in the spirit of TED’s mission, “ideas worth spreading,” the TEDx program is designed to give communities, organizations and individuals the opportunity to stimulate dialogue through TED-like experiences at the local level. TEDx events are fully planned and coordinated independently, on a community-by-community basis.
So I won two tickets to the event and brought my good friend Jaimie. I picked her up on the way and we had a great time on the two hour drive south. Side note: hanging with DOC people is a great way to deal with traffic and travel. The more time you spend together the better in my book.
When we got to the local KPBS studio where it was to be filmed and broadcast the place was buzzing with excitement. Walking up to the counter to sign in and see that Allison had just signed in and Karmel was signing was so cool. I love seeing my D friends at stuff like this.
I did forget to mention the conversation I had with Dr. Edelman at the parking permit ticket booth. Seriously a buck an hour? No all day rate? Geesh!
We sat through 17 different speakers discussing all things type 1. The title of the event was, “A Search for a Cure” and there was so much information my brain was ready to explode.
Allison wrote a great post on Diabetes Mine breaking down all of the speakers talks so I would suggest you check that post out to get some in depth info. I am just not that good a reporter.
I will however tell you that besides all the great ideas and things I learned, the one thing I took away from this talk is hope.
Hope that a cure can and will be found. Hope that very smart people who understand the difficulties of living with this disease have a passion to find a way to stop it. Hope that a vaccine will be developed to stop this disease from ever happening. Hope that health care professionals will understand their type 1 patients better and treat them with understanding and not guilt.
Without hope it is hard to keep doing this day after day with a positive attitude. Not that we need to be in a funk all the time but with no light at the end of a tunnel it is hard to keep moving. And it’s scary.
Hope matters.
Reader Comments (6)
Hope floats~
i was happy i got to watch some of the presentations online during the afternoon. hope is everything. while i still can't say that i have hope for a cure during my lifetime, i do still have hope. hope in the researchers. hope in the artificial pancreas project and other techology that's going to make living with diabetes a little easier.
without hope, what do you have left?
i am so stoked you got to go to this ted talk! del mar, my old stomping grounds! i look forward to the vids being posted online since i wasn't able to watch live.
I didn't get to attend, but I blogged a bit about it too over at the JDCA blog. Sounds like it was a fantastic event - I can't wait to watch all the videos when they are posted on the website.
My brain was swimming by the end of the day. I would have been a horrible notetaker as well.
I am with Jess. I'm not sure there will be a cure in my lifetime, but I was encouraged to hear from so many researchers SO excited about their work.
So glad you got to attend George. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity (but hopefully not?). I can't imagine how much your brains were going on the way home.