By Healthymagination Team | Posted May 13 2010
Our new guest blogger, Jessica Floeh, is a human-centered designer interested in the intersection of technology, health and creative solutions. Jessica was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes at four-years-old and at age 21, she started using an insulin pump to gain better metabolic control. While her medical health improved, she struggled with her body image anxiety. As a result, she started the company Hanky Pancreas, a fashion line created for people who use insulin pumps for Type 1 Diabetes. The current collection is for women and represents a series of design solutions that better integrate the machine with the body and mind.
I am one of modern medicine’s cyborgs. I have a robotic pancreas – or, insulin pump – that lives on the surface of my skin and delivers insulin through a small plastic tube. My human body lost it’s ability to produce insulin and I was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes at age 4. My first memories from this time come to me in three quick scenes starting with my mother driving and crying simultaneously, looking at me in the passenger seat. Next I’m in a hospital bed, holding the palms of my hands toward my face to see each fingertip covered with a bandage. Then there’s a Munchkin from The Wizard of Oz, handing me a signed black-and-white photograph of crew from the 1939 film.
In the past 21 years, the pieces of this puzzle have come together and now I know that my mom, a former nurse, was driving me to St. Louis Children’s Hospital after putting the pieces of her own puzzle together. Her four year old was losing weight, lacking energy and wetting the bed. She knew something was going on and was keeping a close eye on me. One morning, the day she would drive me to the hospital, she figured it out. When telling this story, she starts out describing me as a stubborn little girl who wanted to do grown-up things like take showers, not bubble baths. That summer day while she was washing my hair in the shower, I was jibber-jabbering away and she smelled my fruity breath, a sign of ketoacidosis. This was the moment she knew; I was a Type 1 diabetic.
She rushed me to the hospital to confirm her diagnosis and we were sent into the emergency room. They attached me to two rolling IV stands I named “Bert” and “Ernie” and poked each finger multiple times to keep tabs on my blood glucose levels, hence the bandages. Years later I dug up the Munchkin’s photograph and learned that he was Mickey Carroll, a St. Louis-born actor and one of the last living Munchkins who had proclaimed “follow the yellow brick road!” He spent his retirement in St. Louis giving his time to causes related to children, which is why he was visiting me that day in 1989. His role in The Wizard of Oz was that of a threshold guardian, encouraging Dorothy on her journey from the known into the unknown. Now, I realize he was a sort of threshold guardian for me too.
Throughout my journey, I’d met very few diabetics. But during my undergraduate studies I was excited to meet a guy who had an insulin pump. He was quite a sight with his pump haphazardly clipped to his baggy pants, its tubing hanging out and coiling around his hip. “It’s so much better than injections,” he told me. I was thinking I would rather jab needles in my leg all day than have that awkward eyesore on my body. But my endocrinologist also pushed me toward getting a pump, saying it would help me gain better metabolic control resurfacing from my later adolescent years spent rebelling against my illness. Finally, after 17 years of injecting insulin multiple times a day, I decided to take the plunge and become part machine.
While my health did improve significantly, I developed a whole new layer of anxiety having a piece of medical technology connected to my body at all times. In addition to learning an entirely different insulin regimen, it affected what I wore and how I felt about my body. Experiencing the insulin pump as something that needed the attention of an interaction designer who understood people as social beings, I applied to graduate school at Parsons The New School For Design to study Design and Technology. Here, I have focused my work around alleviating and addressing the internal struggles of modern medicine’s cyborgs. I explore design solutions that transform medical technology into something psychologically reaffirming and socially dynamic.
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