I have been writing on this site for nearly 8 years now and during that time I have had a lot of different awareness passions. It seems that the more I learn about certain issues, it either makes me more passionate or less passionate about that specific issue.
The whole concept of my site has always been to show people that a life with diabetes is just as normal as everyone else, except we have some extra stuff we have to take care of on a daily basis.
From day one, I have had a passion about the lack of education that exists for this disease. For as many people that live with diabetes, whether it’s type 1 or type 2, or LADA or one of the many forms of diabetes, there is such a lack of education. HCP’s don’t even know enough about diabetes (not all obviously). But, when I go to a clinic for a cold and mention I have type 1 diabetes and they are asking me questions about basic diabetes knowledge, that’s pretty scary.
In the years that this site has been around, I have had multiple guest posts from diabetes educators about the importance of education. And when I say education, I mean for HCP’s, general public, people who has diabetes, etc.
Then over time, I realized that a lot of the issues that we have within the diabetes world are actually policy related. That means that if we want to provide more education to people, the people providing the education need to be paid for their time, which means we need legislators to make decisions to ensure that people get paid back for their time and services.
This realization led me to become passionate about diabetes policy advocacy which is where I have focused majority of my time over the last 12-18 months.
The very first thing that I did was reach out to Bennet Dunlap and ask him what I can do to learn more about the policy side of things, because it is definitely complicated.
Luckily, Bennet and Christel have created the most amazing tools ever at the Diabetes Patient Advocacy Coalition. They have made things so much easier for people who are interested in policy advocacy to actually take actions and do things.
So, that’s why I am here now. That is what most of my posts are about.
In order for us to make changes to a lot of diabetes issues, it will take a much higher level policy change.
I firmly believe in showing that a life with diabetes can still be a relatively normal one. There’s just too much negativity reported out there in the media that doesn’t give us a lot of hope.