Cured: simple as that

I always start my weekends off with a good hourly dose of the newest Greys Anatomy. Because its Friday. And Friday night is the night I usually watch Greys Anatomy. Monday night is my night to cook. Tuesday night I don't go and visit my mother. You get the Flight of the Concords gist of things...Friday night is Grey's night, because that's the night the newest episode gets released.

Greys Anatomy is obviously taken with a very large grain of salt when you look at it from a medical viewpoint. I don't watch it for the medicine. I watch it for the Grey  & Mcdreamy get together-break up when Mrs. Mcdreamy arrives-get back together when Mrs. McDreamy leaves to start Private Practice-break up again-Grey sort of dies-Grey lives-Grey & McDreamy get back together-Grey and McDreamy adopt random African baby-Grey and McDreamy have own child-McDreamy works away from home-McDreamy dies-Grey has dead McDreamy's baby-drama. (Times this drama by every character ever. It's exhausting, but worth it for the mental workout you get trying to keep up with it all.)

On Friday's episode, the doctors at Grey Sloane Memorial Hospital (formerly known as Seattle Grace Hospital) did what they do best - performed a complex and probably improbable procedure to 'cure' a patient of his multiple sclerosis. If I ever develop any sort of super weird-hard to cure medical condition, Seattle Grace will be my go to hospital. Those doctors can solve all the crazy rare disorders.

Which is a problem, from an awareness point of view. It means the audience isn't ever set up to learn more about the medicine. What do I know about MS from watching that episode? I saw his hand shake a little, occasionally. That's it. I didn't expect to see all the complexities of living with a disease like MS, but I would have liked to have seen some. Disease can be quite character building, but instead I was distanced from the disease. Made to feel like it was unimportant, and the realities of his every day life were belittled. Focus was shifted entirely from the characters' MS (the entire reason he was even in the episode) and instead honed in on his suave pick-up lines, with the disease relegated as an itsy bitsy sub-plot built in to simply further a bit of fluff romance.

If the print and screen world is constantly curing everything, there's no chance to show what the condition is like in real life. It's lazy, and it says to the audience that those of us living with medical conditions aren't worth taking the time to learn about, or accurately portray.

When dealing with medical conditions in T.V. shows, writing, or any other media, there is a tendency to create the cure, rather than deal with the condition in a practical and realistic way. Maybe because it makes the plot too complex, or because writers and creators think it will be too hard to constantly factor that condition in. Maybe they worry they will lose audiences if they haven't learnt to sift out the mundane details of living with a disease, illness or disability from the really cool stories we pick up along the way.

Whatever the reason, there's a solution: Go and talk to a living gold mine; someone with the disease themselves. Get the basics, tell the basics. Get the humour, the happiness, the sadness, the fear, the anger, the community and tell that side of the story. You don't need to focus everything on the disease, but don't include a disability or otherwise to simply cure it 5 minutes later. Such lazy writing serves no purpose other than to illustrate a lack of compassion and understanding on your part, and to tell audiences that you are not creative enough to get to a particular plot point without disrespecting the experiences of your own characters. (And by extension, the real-life versions that you have based them off).

Access All Channels

What do you get if you place Jill Pantozzi, Michelle Goldsmith and Robert Hoge - 3 writers who are also prominent chronic illness and disability activists - in a room  with a few microphones? A superbly insightful panel on the use of disability and illness in journalism and story telling.

On Easter Sunday morning, when I should have been at home figuring out how much chocolate I could fit in my mouth for breakfast, I was instead hanging out at Contact, a speculative Fiction convention.

The 'Access All Channels' topic was more of a conversation between the audience and panelists, which was great. I felt like they really wanted to get writers involved in how they treat, write, and talk about illness and disability. Some really valid points were brought up, that made me think about the way that I write, and how I react to things that are written about diabetes.

One of the classic things written by diabetics that I see is the '10 things not to say to a diabetic' list. They always put a bit of a wry smile on my face as I play bingo with the things people have said to me. The list is meant to entertain within the circle of those who have the particular illness, disease or disability that it talks about. But what does that list mean to people who don't have the condition? What if that list is the first thing they ever read about what it's like to live with that particular ailment? It says to the reader "Don't say anything to me". It makes them afraid to say the wrong thing, and so they don't talk to us. Which limits their sources when they do genuinely want to read or learn about the disease. If they're reading that list in the first instance, then obviously they are curious; and straight away we are stifling their curiosity and heading them towards a path of ignorance.

What we want is actually the opposite. We want people to write through their ignorance. You can't know every in and out of a disease if you don't have it, and you can't hope to gain any knowledge without being given the chance to acquire it. That's a problem on our behalf, and its something that we should be more tolerant of. We should be encouraging people not to be shy about getting things wrong, because then we have the opportunity to educate about what is right if the person really does want to learn and therefore help us to educate even more people. We need to chill out, and see that if it really is a mistake made because the writer doesn't have that real world experience, that we should be happy to send some friendly facts. If one person has pointed it out, then we don't all need to point it out. I am guilty of this, I know I am. I hope that I can keep a more open mind to diabetes in media and writing.

That's not to say that every case can be treated in this way. Sometimes things are written that are genuinely and truly offensive. Jamie Oliver is a pretty prime example of being given multiple opportunities to recognise the ignorance and mistruths that he spreads, but he continues to do so, so as far as I am concerned he is fair game. You also have people like Cross fit's Greg Glassman, who when confronted with disappointment at his comments about diabetes, decided to step up the offense to a whole new level of 'Wow, you half-wit'.

Experiences can also vary from person to person with the same condition. There are things said about diabetes and surrounding policies, technologies, treatments or day-to-day life that I don't always agree with, and I have had to learn to distance myself from the views and opinions that I don't like - and I know that people will sometimes disagree with my opinions too. I recognise that everyone considers their own opinions valid, and that the more we allow talk about diabetes, the better it is for us (again, there will always be exceptions).

Understand where your knowledge base comes from, and that if you have the condition being talked about, that your knowledge base is alot more personal than that of someone who doesn't have the condition.

The point I guess, is understanding that the more writing is done about illness or disability, the more normalised it will become in society. Even if we consider the writing to be bad, we don't need to jump all over it and discourage the writer or publication from ever trying to share our experiences again. It can be hard work advocating for an illness, and we need them to want to be on our side and want to understand. A simple message about what you thought was wrong, unsafe or offensive might be all it takes for an issue to be resolved, and for the writer to think of their mistake as a positive learning experience, rather than a deterrent. It also shows them that we can be approached before publication to fact check if we act like a friendly bunch of people.

I'm not saying I'm going to be perfect at tolerance. I will have my exceptions - media releases on the blueberry tea cure are one, and if I think something could be dangerous for the illness it is speaking about, or it is apparent that there was an ability to fact check but the author was too lazy (Hansel and Gretel) then I'm likely to arc up. But I will stop and think if what I say about a piece of writing is really helping, or if its just being picky.

Happy Birthday, Sweet Morty

Happy chocolate sales day! I hope everyone managed to get some cheap chocolate bargains to keep aside for hypos.

As of yesterday, Morty (my diabetes) officially turned 4 years old. An Easter diaversary. Morty is nearly school-aged. I dread the day when Morty learns to count and realises that throughout the year I have only bought it 36 presents, throws a Dudley and starts screaming at me "36! But last year, last year I had 37!". I suppose I will have to do a quick Petunia on the situation and promise to buy it another 2 new CGM sensors to stop a full-blown blood sugar control meltdown from happening.

I suppose I might buy Morty a card. But what do you say to diabetes?

If I loved my diabetes more, I might talk about the day I bought it home from the hospital with me. And how bloody confused I was leaving after an overnight stay with a permanent part of my life that I didn't know how to care for. Would I tell Morty that I never wanted to bring him home with me, and wished I could leave him sitting in a bed of his own at the hospital forever? I probably wouldn't want to tell him he was unplanned.

I won't go off on that tangent though, because I don't love my diabetes enough to reminisce fondly about the first time I held a needle to my stomach.

I could talk about how it Morty has grown as a disease. The progressions I saw after getting past that initial 3 month period when my world became a complete blur of eating, injections, sleeping and crying everywhere.

How I saw changes as Morty grew from that volatile infant state to toddler stage. I sort of knew what I was doing and was managing to look like I had my shit together. I could leave my house with my hair and make-up done; looking composed and not at all like I had just dealt with a tantrum of epic proportions.

Maybe then I will talk about my dreams and hopes for Morty's future. How much I'm hanging out for him to grow up, because I'm not as fond of his childlike behaviour as he thinks I am. I have been told, however, that an unfortunate aspect of raising a condition like Morty, is that they don't grow up. The most I can hope for is that with lots of therapy (and money) his tantrums may become a little easier to control. That as he grows, I will get to know the early warning signs of a melt-down and soothe him before I'm left with a screaming toddler disease in aisle 3 of the supermarket, because he wants lollies NOW.

The sign off would probably read: 'Happy Birthday, sweet Morty.'

Hypo Tax got me like....

I have been busily documenting my recent trip overseas, so please excuse my absence. I'm about halfway through that, and it's taking me a really long time. So I took a break from here.

This is relevant to my trip overseas, I promise.

The UK recently introduced a Soft Drink Tax, to come in to effect in 2018. Drinks that have more than 8gm of sugar per 100ml will be taxed at a higher amount. I'm just going to put it out there that I struggled in the UK to find adequate hypo treatment. Everything already has reduced sugar over there. I spent time way too much time when I was hypo desperately reading the labels of drinks trying to find something that was of a high enough quick acting sugar percent to bring my BGLs back up to a safe number. When normally in Australia I can drink 1/4 of a bottle of sprite to treat a hypo, in the UK I was having to guzzle half or a full bottle to treat a hypo because of the reduced sugar. Extra calories I didn't need, and it left me feeling really seedy, because I don't normally drink much soft drink.

The other point to to make is - I don't think that a soft drink tax is going to do jack for the UK, when a sample standard diet includes fish, chips, pies, clotted cream, beer, pasties, salt on everything and anything else you can name that will clog your arteries. Jamie Oliver is one of those that pushed heavily for the sugar tax and I did have the misfortune to eat in one of his restaurants. No surprise that the healthiest thing on the menu was a fatty pork burger. You did have the option to change the chips for salad - if you paid extra. But we already knew that Jamie Oliver is very hypocritical when it comes to healthy eating, so no surprise there.

So Australia has recently decided they would like to jump on the cave-man 'sugar bad' trend and is looking at introducing a similar tax. I'm disappointed. I'm sick of the sugar fear mongering that goes on. The more we talk about sugar in these terms, the harder it is for the public to truly understand diabetes and how it actually all works. The message about 'sugar bad' gets through all right - but only enough for everybody ever to question why I'm having sugar if I have diabetes, because that's what they're told it gives you. If I already have diabetes, I'm not sure what they think telling me 'sugar bad' is going to achieve; maybe if I don't drink sugary drinks it will stop me from getting some extra diabetes on top of my diabetes?

The 'sugar bad' fear messages only serve to instill in the senseless public that people with diabetes chose this disease. It encourages hate towards us, as a by-product of the fear they feel when they do a mental calculation of how much soft drink they have consumed and have conculded that they have put themselves at risk of Type 2 Diabetes. It encourages poor diets (such as that god-awful Paleo diet that people crap on about) in wrong-footed attempts to 'undo' all the sugar they have consumed in their life. 

Sugar saves my life, on an almost daily basis. I don't think it's fair to tax that, or disillusion the public about the role that sugar plays in helping me to control my BGLs, and more importantly, stay alive. 

Currently sugary drinks are the best and cheapest means I have to treat a hypo. Drinks are often the best way to treat a hypo because simply swallowing when you're in the brain fog of a hypo is much easier than chewing and then swallowing. 

Whilst the tax may be aimed at the drink companies, they are more than likely to pass this on to consumers, or start to make products with less sugar (and thereby less effective in raising BGLs to safe levels). A 2L Coles lemonade costs little more than a dollar and can be used for about 10 hypos. Similarly, a 6 pack of poppers is only a few dollars, coming in at something like 50c per hypo. Glucose tablets on the other hand, whilst they are great to keep in my handbag, cost a small fortune. If you go by the way of Amazon, you can get the bottles of 50 pretty cheap, but be prepared to offer up your first born to pay for shipping. Even buying the True Plus brand available in Australia is obscenely expensive. A pack of 50 costs $15 and will treat approximately 12 hypos. This is more than $1 per hypo, when a Coles Lemonade is less than $2 for 10 hypos. 

It should be the aim of the diabetes bodies in Australia to protect the interests of those with diabetes first. Which means that if they want to support this sort of sugar-hate (and in turn diabetes-hate) movement, they need to have a strategy for education about how sugar works so that I can stop being harrased by the know-it-all who sees my medic-alert tag as I save my life with a Sprite. Importantly, they need to be ensuring that we will continue to have fairly-priced access to hypo treatments. 

Add to this that we can't nanny everybody. At some point, you have got to realise that people are free to make their own unhealthy choices. Education about food needs to be introduced earlier to children so they can make the correct choices to look after their bodies. I understand that we would like to decrease the rates of type 2 diabetes, but the people who get Type 2 Diabetes from lifestyle aren't just drinking soft drink. There's so many more factors to Type 2 Diabetes than a like for soft-drinks. You need to be looking at increasing exercise rates, reducing portion sizes, educating about healthy food choices. They've also been making those choices for a very long time, and probably won't stop with a price increase.

And honestly? While Macca's, KFC, chips and other fatty, salty and calorie-laden fast foods are around, we don't have a hope on curbing obesity rates by introducing a simple sugary-drink tax. Extend the tax to them and maybe we can start talking about potential nation-wide health benefits.

Until you do that, I spend enough on my healthcare already, don't make me add 'hypos' to the list of reasons I will probably never own a house.

Diabetes.It

I collect Diabetics. Accidentally. Not in a creepy, Ed Gein sort of way. I just happen to find them, everywhere.

In Italy, I found 2. Or 2 found me my pump. You can't really miss my pump, especially if you know what a pump is. King sticks out a little.

I met the first Type 1 diabetic in Venice. My husband and I were on a bit of a search for good gnocchi. Google recommended 'Osteria Al Milion', so off we went.

Just need a miniature quaffle...

It was a very warm, inviting little restaurant, and the quidditch-hoop inspired candle holders gave me a good vibe. We were seated and given the free bread basket that you seem to get whenever you sit down for a meal in Italy. I noticed that the lady who attended to us was eyeballing my pump. I didn't pay much attention, figuring she was probably wondering what sort of ancient MP3 player I had attached to my hip. A different waitress took our order. As I ordered, I noticed the same lady still eyeballing King from across the room. As soon as the waitress left our table, she hurried over.

"I have one too". Proudly, she lifted her shirt to show me her pump. "But mine is old". A beautiful and well kept white MiniMed Veo sat clipped over the lip of her trousers. If hers was old, she must have taken the best care of it. King is less than 6 months old and he looks like he's been in a few cat fights in that time.



I smiled in acknowledgment and she took the encouragement, coming over to stand next to us. "Your only the second person I have seen with diabetes. I saw another pump once, in the market." She paused. "It's hard".

I agreed with her, and we had a bit of a chat about the joys of diabetes. By now, the restaurant was filling up a bit. She excused herself as our food arrived. Before she left to attend to other patron she turned back with a warm smile, and gave me the carb counts to my gnocchi, the panna cotta I had ordered for desert and the bread I had eaten.

Pannacotta...carb count: Delicious so it doesn't matter.

A week or so later found my husband and I in Sorrento (where the weather was remarkably warm). From Sorrento, we took a day trip out to Pompeii, which was only a half hour train ride by the Circumvesuviana line. Pompeii was quite warm, and for the first time since arriving in Europe, I was walking around blissfully sans jumper, T-shirt only. My T-shirt of choice just so happened to be my Type 1 Diabetes memes, "Type One Dia-Bad-Ass" Tee.

It was as my husband and I were trudging our weary way back out of Pompeii that I found my second diabetic in Italy. I was just hitting hypo (after a 3 hour walk around Pompeii in the sun) and focusing on placing one foot in front of the other when I heard "Are you diabetic?". My head swivelled towards the direction the magic word had come from. "I saw your T-shirt". An American girl had outstretched her hand towards me, holding in it, yet another glorious Medtronic pump.

"Yep!" My face split into a shaky-hypo grin.

My husband shook his head as the American Girl and I started up a conversation. "Seriously? You have a superpower. Stand together, I'm taking a photo".

We obeyed, and he clicked a photo, while her friend (or boyfriend, I don't know) did the same.

I didn't find out her name, but I do have a picture of her. And I know she's from California, and that she's excited for the 640G, which they don't have in America yet, but her UK friends have told her all about it. I also know that she's awesome by default.

I'm in England now, and just waiting for London to give up the diabetic goods!

Brisbane Airport Take 2

I don't know how this is going to turn out.

I'm snuggled up in my hotel room in South Korea right now, tapping this out on a portable keyboard the size of my hand, and fighting with blogger about how to login from a tablet. Blogger is definitely winning this fight, and has forced me on to a very basic app with little functionality. But I'm trying anyway, just so Blogger knows that it hasn't broken my spirit yet.

So my honeymoon Fiiinally rolled around. Only 9 months after my wedding (That sounds like a long time. I could have had a baby in that time if Id wanted to!) We're off to Europe for a month, with a stopover in Korea tonight.

My insulin is back in the Fridge (*fingers crossed it lasts because the Fridge to Go was pretty much room temperature when we got to the hotel), and my BGLs behaved quite nicely on the plane, stayingf between 4 - 10.

I did get randomly seletced to do a full body scan at Brisbane International. My immediate thought was panic. Followed by panic. Then I remembered the handy little airport security card Medtronic give you, which yes, I had bought with me.

So random security guy (who looked very familiar,) who picked me out for this is trying to tell me the full body scanners are fine to go through with a pump because people with pace makers go through.  I wasn't having any of it and thrust my little palm sized airport security instructions under his nose. Unfortunately for me, the instructions do say that the pump is removable (which contradicted my doctors note). So my options were limited. I had to do the scan.

I made it really obvious that Iwas feeling very anxious about taking my pump off and just handing it over to a random I had never met before. They must train them better at International, because he actually listened. He explained the process step by step, and answered all my questions (unlike the last security douchebag I came across in domestic.

The deal was that he would walk my pump around the scanner, in my sight at all times. Then he stood at the other side of the scanner as I got in. As Igot scanned, he held the pump up in the air, hands towards me, at my sight level. Door opened, I got my pump back. Then he walked me over to the dexplosives/drug swab dude, explaining exactly why they were swabbing the pump, which was basically because it hadnt been through any screening points.

Whilst I wasn't entirely happy at having to take my pump off and hand it over, I was very thankful to the security guy for realising how anxious I was about this and taking the time to explain what was happening and why, and doing what he could to help a situation that I wasn't comfortable with.So kudos to him.

Only 2 more airports to go through, and hopefully I won't get selected for 'random screening'.

Tabletop

My husband and I have started walking more. I mean, I wouldn't really call it walking. I would call this hiking painfully. Basically if the hike looks like it a unique form of agonsing torture caused by severe leg cramps and burning lungs then that's what we're walking.

I have suspicions my husband likes doing this so much as a couples activity because I can't breathe heavily and talk at the same time.

On Sunday we decided that doing death by Tabletop might be a good idea, as we were staying in Toowoomba for my bestie's housewarming.

Tabletop as seen from Picnic Point

Hugh, my bestie & I set off for Tabletop. The trip there was a whole lot of me and my anxiety freaking out about taking my little tiny Micra out on a dirt road to the wilderness*, and my bestie explaining as calmly as you can to someone with irrational phobias that her sisters little Swift did the trip 3 times a week.

We did eventually make it. All of my car tyres didn't spontaneously and simultaneously puncture on the gravel and go flat, so that was a plus.

Tabletop isn't a far walk. It's less than 2km return. It is a bit of a scramble though. You start up a steep little camel hump, get about 5 meters of reprieve, before the path is no longer a path. It becomes a jumble of quite large rocks that you need hands and knees (and in my case, bum) to scramble over. At one point I knocked my cannula, which was in my leg, heavily into a rock as I pulled myself up.

At the end of the camel's hump & the start of actual Tabletop, my BGL was quite comfortably on 13. I was happy with that; having purposefully not given at insulin at breakfast in order to exercise.

We continued the scramble, climbing up a steep path of shale. Rocks that slid underneath your feet as you climbed. This was probably the most exhausting part of the climb up, and probably the only spot we paused to catch our breath.

Looking up at the last climb

Finally, the last part of the hike up was basically a rock wall. I stopped here, not because I didn't have the fitness to go up (it was probably less than 20m to the top), but because I have a massive fear of heights (lots of my anxieties were challenged on Sunday). It was basically a rock face on the edge of a cliff. I'm also prone to fainting when I get really nervous. I made the call that passing out on a near-vertical climb was probably not in my best interests.

A flatter area of shale

My husband and best friend climbed up while I did more BG checks. BG was still good.

We started our climb back down, slowly over the shale, as it slipped even more when you head downhill. Then scrambling back over the camel's hump. About halfway back over the rocks, I spotted a shiny little familiar object in a small gap between the rocks.

A test strip. One that I could identify had come from a Verio meter. Somehow, as my legs ached from pushing up over and over again, I found it comforting to know that one of my kind had been here before me.

With renewed vigor (and feeling spurred on by being able to see the speck that was my car below) I finished the walk. BGL was 10.2.

I would have called it a success. Except for one minor detail. Remember that bump to my cannula earlier? Neither did I. Until an hour later when my pump was alarming 'No Delivery, blocked insulin flow'. A BGL of 23.3 (a 13 point rise in an hour) makes you feel pretty sick.

There's nothing like being physically exhausted with a high BG.

Thanks D, I really owe you one.




*Where the supposed wilderness is probably less than 5km from Toowoomba itself. We definitely could have walked back to civilisation in less than 2 hours. But try telling that to anxious me. Anxious me doesn't listen to reason very well. After all, I think Mt. Coot-tha is in the wilderness, and I managed an amazing panic attack the other day when my husband got us lost in Daisy Hill Reserve (I actually laid down on the dirt path and proclaimed I didn't want to die, and only felt relieved when we came across a sign pointing back to the car park).


_________________________________________________________________________________

Reason Why I'm Hypo: After correcting that 23.3, I spent between 6 - 8pm hypo with BGLs between 2 - 3. I can't say if it was due to the exercise or the ridiculous heat wave Brisbane has going on right now.

Be Prepared

Scar's lyrics have absolutely nothing to do with this post. As far as I am aware, I won't be plotting to overthrow Mr. Turnbull and take over leadership of Australia anytime soon. Although if they continue on with this idiotic idea that we should Americanise our health care system, maybe I might find myself a-plotting. All I can say is, once the pathology companies start charging me for blood tests that I don't even want to take in the first place; my endo is going to have to be satisfied with one single HbA1c test per year.  And she won't get me to do any of those frilly extra tests like cholesterol and kidney function that always get ordered. You want bad diabetic, libs? You got it.

I forget where I was going with this post, because I am definitely replaying the Lion King in my head right now. I know what I'll be watching tonight.

Be prepared. Constant Vigilance. 

Listening to Made-Eye has taught me well (But really, when has anything from Harry Potter not taught me well?).

I keep a spare vial of insulin in the fridge at work. Because CONSTANT VIGILANCE. I take spare needles with me because CONSTANT VIGILANCE. Spare Lancing device. CONSTANT VIGILANCE.

When you're diabetic, constant vigilance works out well. Diabetics are still, surprisingly, human. Humans make mistakes. Some humans might leave home with 2 hours left in their reservoir. Some humans might arrive at work, and find out they didn't remember to bring any extra insulin with them. Or reservoir connectors.

So I am very grateful for all these safety measures that I put in place. The insulin in my office fridge saved me a dash home during peak hour. The pen needles in the bottom of my bag meant I could inject the insulin into the reservoir in lieu of having no connectors.

A spare lancing device meant that when I was coming back from Japan a few years ago now, and my husband dropped and lost my lancing device in a crowded plane, I could still test my BGLs.

Diabetes requires CONSTANT VIGILANCE.

Always

I identify as many things. Type 1 Diabetic. Wife. Daughter. Sister. Team Michael shipper. Nerd. The quintessential 00's emo kid. Metal-head. Adult colouring-in enthusiast (although honestly, I've been printing colouring in pages off the interwebs for years, this new colouring craze just makes my hobby more accessible). Pokemon Master. Fussy eater.

A child of the Harry Potter generation.

It was ridiculously cute when my sister messaged me to ask me if I was ok today. 

Rest in Peace, Alan Rickman.

R.E.S.P.E.C.T

Today as I was browsing along in the interwebs, as one does, I came across an insightful & beautiful article written by a girl who was diagnosed with genital herpes. Although I don't have herpes or any related diseases, I still found myself agreeing with every word she had written about the stigmatisation of diseases such as herpes, HIV/AIDS, and of course...diabetes.

A mere 2 hours later, in a completely unrelated manner, I had a friend throw this picture up on Facebook:

What I'm sure was meant as a self-congratulatory pat-on-the-back came across as insensitive and uneducated on many levels. This picture tells people to be ashamed of themselves if they can't 'say the same'. It offers no chance for explanation (not that any is needed. In this life we live, stuff happens all the time that is completely out of your control). It again reinforces that specific diseases can make us less worthy to be called human beings. Having or not having AIDS does not make you a better person, nor does it increase or decrease your worth as a person. It doesn't change who you are as a person or what you've done, or will do, in your life.

It made me appreciate Elle's article even more.

Even the title of her article gave me the 'I feel you' fuzzies that can only come with knowing someone else out there gets you, however indirectly. Titled 'Why I Love Telling People I have Herpes', I feel very similarly about my T1D. Life and my interactions with others becomes so much easier when my T1D is announced and out in the open. Just like the author, Elle, I had a brief 6 month period where I felt like less of a person, and more a giant cesspool of self-blame, for having a disease that has been so stigmatized as something to be ashamed of. Diabetes is very much portrayed as a lazy persons disease with a very defined description of how hideously awful we are as human beings. I briefly wondered if I would wake up one day and have transformed overnight into the stereotypical diabetic - terribly unmotivated, largely obese and all of a sudden extremely ugly. Safe to say that so far that hasn't happened to me - because so far, diabetes is a disease that doesn't concern itself with how you look or act - It just picks a person and forces them to become best friends forever.

Like Elle, I also get a little kick out of the moment I tell someone I have T1D. Their reaction often opens up a natural conversation about T1D and Diabetes in general and gives me a chance to educate someone about what living with diabetes is really like. Its a chance to change the way we view and think of people with diabetes in a negative sense and hopefully one day, turn diabetes into just another disease that sucks to have, instead of a disease that society says we should be ashamed to have. A chance to reintroduce the human aspect of living with diabetes. I can only hope that if enough of these conversations are going on - by people with all types of diabetes - that there might be a day in the future when I am not asked why I am not fat.

People with Diabetes deserve to have their disease and their own sense of self treated with respect. The current generalised attitude denotes one of shame, avoidance and denial. Whilst we know people in the medical profession are taught the pathophysiological mechanisms of diabetes and its contracture, they too can become prey to this way of thinking that we should do as they say because we brought it on ourselves to begin with. Too many stories of doctors or nurses treating a person with diabetes as a lesser person or someone who needs to be 'controlled' by them, because of the way they percieve us, and our apparent lack of respect for self.

I have self-respect in bucketfuls. Self respect is far deeper a notion than how many minutes you worked out for today or what food you put in your mouth. Self respect is about consideration for your body, and all of its needs, including sometimes, the need to forego looking after one aspect of your health, in order to build up another. Its about recognising that balance between mental and physical health. You can have self respect and be in burn out. To me, self respect is about being able to speak up when people say or do something that doesn't sit right with you - including telling a medical professional that maybe they haven't got it right. Because I respect my body so much, that I do all sorts of unimaginable things to make sure I keep kicking on. Its through respect of my self and my body that I push needles into my skin and lancet my fingers.

We need more Elle's in this world. People who'll tell it like it is, and take embarrasment and shame away from ordinary situations.