Category: DBlog Week

There are certain words that I think can certainly hurt and those are related to race, direct insults like fat, ugly, etc.

When it comes to diabetes, I may be in the minority here, but in a lot of circumstances my thoughts are this….. It’s just a word, get over it.

Take a second to look at the name of my site, do you think I care about the word diabetic? You can call me a person with diabetes, diabetic, or whatever else you choose. Diabetes is not all that I am, but it is a way to describe part of me. Just like if I went into a sports bar on a Sunday afternoon, I would be identified as an Eagles fan, not Chris, but as an Eagles fan.

If you prefer to be called one or the other, that’s great, I also don’t have anything against that… why? Because I respect everyone’s decision to like or dislike certain words.

Checking vs testing blood sugar is another one that doesn’t bother me. I understand that testing makes it sound like a pass or fail, but honestly, that is way overthinking it. It’s just a phrase. Once again, my own personal opinion and I respect the opinion of others who may not like the word.

I’m not one to deep dive analyze every single word. I don’t think into this stuff like that. There is way too much other crap in my life to worry about and stress over, that the simple choice of a few words is not one of them.

Another one that I see a lot of chatter about is patient vs consumer vs customer. Another one that I don’t care too much about but I see it this way. I am a patient of my doctor and healthcare team. I am a customer to an insurance company. And I am also a consumer and customer to supply companies. I am NOT patient of Novo Nordisk, Medtronic, Bayer, Roche, Lilly, etc.
However, if you want to call me a patient of these supply companies, it’s not really going to bother me. Like I said, I have family health problems, business problems, a 14 month old, and plenty of other battles to fight, like access.

When I have to go from paying $25 for a one month supply of insulin to $985 for that same one month supply because my insurance changed…..I don’t give a F&^# what the insurance company calls me. Much bigger issue to deal with.

Once again, I want to re-iterate. I have no problem with people who do not like these words. I am not saying that my way of thinking is the right way, it’s just the way that I think and handle things, that’s all. Fighting to eliminate usage of some of these words is just not something that I am passionate about, therefore, I don’t spend my time worrying about it.

I am all for finding your passion in advocacy and advocating the hell out of it.

So, if this is one of your advocacy passions, then fight on and I will support you as an advocate.

I am so happy that this topic is part of Diabetes Blog Week. I don’t think that this is a topic that is discussed enough. Whether it’s because people who are going through mentally don’t want to talk about it on their sites or the fact that there is just not enough coverage, studies, etc. that go into mental health awareness.

I tend to have pretty tough skin (no lancet pun intended), so I have been able to learn how to let things go and not fret the small the stuff. This has been something that I have learned over the years of dealing with stressful situations in business, diabetes, and life in general.

Diabetes has more of an emotional and mental impact on my wife than it does on me. She worries constantly about my blood sugars, worrying about them going low in the middle of the night and not waking up, or traveling somewhere and not having Skittles or other forms of sugar on me (she carries that stuff when we are together).

When I have a high blood sugar or just having one of those diabetes days, I just try and count to 10, think about the positives in the situation and realize that what is getting me down is probably not as big of a deal in the long-term picture than it feels at that time. I then think about that and it relieves me of my stress or negative mental feelings that I may have at that time.

Being an entrepreneur and knowing that every single day, I am in charge of where the finances for my family are going to come from, weighs heavily on me and my mental capacity. But, like I said above, I have learned to deal with each situation and not spend too much time thinking about one single issue. There are much larger issues that others are dealing with, so I think to myself, “it could be worse”.

I am so glad that there are advancements in digital health and digital therapy, especially in the mental health area. Therapy with ThriveTalk is one of the companies that is helping to connect people in need of mental health support with highly skilled and vetted therapists.

It is not easy, I have not always been able to talk my way through these stress and negative thoughts, but it has taken time, a lot of time.

There are definitely times when I say, ‘damn, I hate this disease because it sucks so damn much.”

But then I stop and say, “well, it’s not going anywhere, so just deal with it”

It may not work for everyone, but it works for me. If it’s not something that I can directly be in control of, then I can’t waste time stressing about it because it is out of my control.

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.