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Tag: life with diabetes

What is a Normal Life with Diabetes

Chris Stocker

The other day somebody was talking to me about my blog and I mentioned that it’s a blog about how I live normally with diabetes.  They then asked me, what does that mean?  What does living normally with diabetes mean?  Well, I had never been asked that question before, but I thought about it and here is my answer.  This is how I live normally with type 1 diabetes.

I’ve spoken about my life before diabetes on here a few times, but it’s 99.9% about my life now, which obviously includes being a diabetic.  When I was diagnosed 6 years ago, I knew my life would change, but I wasn’t sure how, and I didn’t know how much.  Living normally with diabetes means to me that I live a normal life, just like anybody else, except that I have diabetes.  This means that I have some additional things that I must do.  For instance, I go to the gym, well try to, just like anybody else, except I must test my blood sugar before, during, and after.  I go out to dinner just like anybody else, except I pull out my insulin pump, count my carbs, and intake some insulin.

Insulin pumps, testing strips, blood glucose meters, IV preps, lancets, lancing devices, reservoirs, infusion sets, this is normal to me.  Therefore, I’m living a normal life with diabetes.

Blood Sugars Stayed High All Sunday

Chris Stocker

As I mentioned in yesterday’s blog, Sunday was just very blah.  Even after I posted the blog, it didn’t get much better.  My blood sugar hit a high of 465, right before I was to go to dinner.  I took almost a 17 unit correction and knew I wouldn’t be eating for about another 30-45 minutes.  Everybody ordered pizza, but I knew that I obviously couldn’t eat that  with a high blood sugar, so I opted out for a Greek salad.  Luckily, the waitress forgot to put my order in and my salad came out 10 minutes after everybody else was eating.  This gave my sugar more time to come down, which it came down to 285 before I ate.  It just felt like crap sitting there not being able to eat the pizza because my sugar was so high.  But this is that’s what goes on sometimes when you’re living a life with diabetes.High Blood Sugar

The salad was good for my diet however, so that was one good thing.  One of the in-laws had asked me, why I was eating salad, was it better for my diabetic diet?  I said, well I’m just on a general diet, nothing special because I am diabetic, I have insulin to take if I eat bad things.  After having a short conversation, I said why don’t you read my diabetes blog on a daily basis, because you can learn a lot about diabetes from it, and from reading one of the other diabetes blogs.  Hopefully you all see your reader base go up by one 🙂

Because of the high blood sugars yesterday, I decided to take a break from my BBQ sauce that I have fell in love with over the past several weeks.  I figured that it would be a good idea to keep that high fructose corn syrup out of my diet for a while.  Somebody sent me an e-mail after I wrote that post about their sauce being the only one approved by the ADA, I’d love to try it, if you are out there listening.

Well it is a Monday, so I should probably start working on some projects that I probably slacked off Golf Courseon over the weekend.  I’d so much rather be doing this again (see picture on left, Par 5, second shot)

Share a Story Contests – Too Many or Too Few – Your Thoughts?

Chris Stocker

From here on out, every Friday is going to be an opinionated blog.  Let’s call it, ‘Fired Up Friday’.  During the week I typically blog about things that are going on in my life, hence the Life of a Diabetic blog name.  I try to detail things that can go on while living with diabetes or living normally with diabetes as I call it.  There are a lot of things out in the D world that you may or may not agree with.  In the case of some of my Friday blogs, you may or may not agree with them, if you don’t I would really appreciate your feedback and comments.  The way I look at every situation is this; I may have an opinion on something because I don’t know enough about the other side to form a positive opinion.

Today’s idea came about because of noticing how many different diabetes story contests there are out there.  STOP!

There are enough story submission, share your story, whatever you want to call it contests and sites around, don’t try to create another one.  This is more geared towards companies than it is the d-bloggers.  I am all about d-bloggers sharing their story; in fact I think that part is awesome.  I think guest-blogging is one of the greatest ideas in the world (I am starting a weekly guest blog on February, so don’t be surprised if you get an e-mail from me soon), but all these contests need to stop.  Find a more creative way to engage us diabetics and your “customers”.

The first share your story type of post I saw was on Kerri’s site.  I submitted my story to her when I first started blogging and she published it on her site and I, still to this day, am very grateful and appreciative of that.  These are the type of story submissions that should stay, but I have seen a few companies recently start collecting stories for gifts, and I think it is just one big ploy to get business.

Majority of you know where I used to work, if you don’t e-mail me and we can discuss it on the side, I wouldn’t give them the recognition on my blog.  Bitter?  No, just know the behind the scenes and not legally allowed to speak about it in a public forum like this.  But reason I bring that up is that there was a story submission contest and at the end of it, I didn’t see the corporate benefits of it.  I can definitely see the benefits for the community, because you get to read a lot of people’s stories that you don’t normally see.  Maybe they don’t have a blog, so they aren’t writing about their daily lives, or maybe they have a blog, but you just don’t know about it.

So, I will end this blog with this.  I am all for sharing your story, but with the diabetes OC, not with corporate contests, because you just become an e-mail on a mailing list.

What are your thoughts?  Do you think that there is too many share your story contests out there or do you think that there is not enough?  I am interested to hear your opinions.