Blood Sugar Trampoline:
A Story of living with Type 1 Diabetes
Where I share my journey of living with type 1 diabetes in Ireland, information about the services available to people with diabetes, my volunteering with support and activism through Diabetes Ireland.
Photo credit Fennel Photography
In this post, I will provide a short summary of the information revealed from parliamentary question responses on how many people in Ireland use insulin pumps, what clinics provide them as a treatment option and how many new pump starts are done each year.
My diabetes diagnosis shattered my confidence in my ability to take care of myself, and my plan quickly became to just get through the rest of the term, move home for the summer to my previous summer job and figure the rest out over the summer. Adjusting to my new normal of living with diabetes began while I was still in hospital, or did it?
I realised last year that in all the blog posts I’d done these last 13 years, I have never shared my diagnosis story, so here it goes. My diabetes diagnosis is not unique; many of my friends with diabetes share similar experiences; however, some people end up very ill and may have spent time in intensive care units in hospitals. Thankfully this was not the case for me, but I did feel like I was dying.
The purpose of the document is to provide an estimate of the number of people who are using HSE-funded Flash and CGMs in Ireland and to prompt a discussion around access equality. I believe we need to talk about how fair it is that so many are approved for HSE funding and why some people are still being made to pay.
Thirty years of diabetes means thirty years of diabetes care as a health “service user”. In my previous 30 years of diabetes post, I focused on how my diabetes management has changed significantly. This post is about how I've been a healthcare service user. I’ve changed my care a lot because it took me some time to find the care I needed.
Since 2018 I’ve been getting emails from people with diabetes in Ireland asking about the availability of the tubeless insulin pump, Omnipod, made by Insulet. When companies began to announce their new pumps being available in Ireland, I began to suspect that Omnipod was either not approved or Insulet had not applied for the tender. So I decided to find out which it was. The missing pump piece.
April 2023 marked five years since the revolutionary flash glucose monitor, the Freestyle FS Libre, became free for people with type 1 diabetes in Ireland, however, only to those aged between the age of four and twenty-one years, which is approximately 20% of our population. This post reflects on the lack of progress there has been in making FS Libre available to those over age 21 years in Ireland.
There are lots of people on social media doing their bit for diabetes awareness, and this is fantastic. However, raising awareness seems to be a big buzzword these days, but what does that really mean, and how do we raise awareness of something effectively? Should I do it by sharing a random image on my Facebook feed that doesn’t tell any of my friends anything at all? Or should I use my social media to share information?