I love “free shower” – which, if you’re diabetic and using an insulin pump or a CGM, you know that means “the shower when you’re changing sites and you don’t have any hubs connected to you.”
It’s nice to lather up and not worry about catching on an infusion set or a sensor edge. Thing is, this is what’s waiting for me when I’m done getting all cleaned up:
The potlock o’ diabetes crap
*This blog post was originally published at Six Until Me.*
There’s been a handful of photographers who have tackled the Diabetes 365 project for this year, and I’m proud to be in their company. It’s a very inspiring experience, to see how diabetes is reflected in the lives of the members of D365, and how it is captured through their camera lenses.
Some of us are using our DSLR cameras, some of us our point-and-shoots, some documenting with our iPhones or our Blackberries, but every last one of us is showing our lives with diabetes, every day. I know I’ve talked about this project before, but watching the photos stack up in the Diabetes 365 Flickr group and seeing how, and what, people with diabetes are choosing to document their lives with this disease is incredible.
You didn’t need to join the group in January – it’s a rotating door of participants. If you want to join the Diabetes 365 group, you can jump in anytime and start. Every day can be Day 1.
*This blog post was originally published at Six Until Me.*
Yesterday, the mail arrived. There were catalogs for clothes (mmmm, can’t wait until May!), letters from friends, the crappy bills that keep arriving even though we didn’t forward them to our new address, and oh yeah, that one bill from my mail order pharmacy.
For a thousand dollars.
Dated January 30, 2009.
So, being the rational and patient woman that I always am, I ripped up the envelope it came in, cursing under my breath like my temperamental buddy, Yosemite Sam. Punctuated each tear of the paper with “fricka-frakin’ insurance bill dagnabit …”
And then I called the mail order pharmacy company.
“Thank you for calling Byram Health Care. Your call is important to us.” Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Six Until Me.*
Dear Oprah and Dr. Oz,
Diabetes is very expensive to manage and to treat the complications of, but what comes at an even higher cost is the damage of statements from a doctor, claiming that diabetes is reversible. I was diagnosed as a child, and my type 1 diabetes is not the result of any controllable factors. However, I have many friends who have type 2 diabetes who can make the same claim.
I can’t lie – I had a lot of hope about your episode regarding diabetes. Even though it was billed as “the silent killer” and even though I knew you’d show the darkest side of diabetes-related complications possible to “sensationalize” this disease, I was holding out because I wanted this episode to be accurate. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Six Until Me.*
Thanks to the happy combination of Factor V Leiden and being pregnant, I’m rocking a higher chance than average for a blood clot while traveling. Back in October, when I was just a few months along, a lot of my travel was on the Acela, cruising back and forth between Boston and Philly, in addition to some flights. So I needed to take these clotting risks into account.
“You’re telling me I should pick up some compression stockings, then?” I asked my obstetrician, after we had discussed my upcoming travel plans. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Six Until Me.*
It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…
I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…
Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?
I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…
The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You
When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…
Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book
I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…
