Diabetes Discrimination in Career Choices

Lucky for me, or maybe for the world :-O, I never aspired to be an astronaut or an airline pilot for my career. But I have met just a few people with diabetes who did. In particular, a couple who all they wanted in life was to fly airplanes. But when they were diagnosed with type 1 diabetes they ruled it out. At the Diabetes Hands Foundation MasterLab 2016 conference there was a fantastic presentation on “Diabetes Discrimination in the Workplace”  that prompted me to feature this issue. I’ve divided it into two posts though as it was getting a bit long.

The first of which is how diabetes may affect your career choice. The second post will feature discrimination in your workplace and what your rights are.

Did you know that it’s only since 2015 that a person with type 1 diabetes can apply for An Garda Siochana in Ireland? But there are still difficulties for people with type 1 diabetes who want to join the defense forces, emergency services, railway workers and some careers at sea? What this probably means is that no one with type 1 diabetes has succeeded in passing the fitness tests to qualify for any of these careers. (source; Diabetes Ireland). But other countries don't have these restrictions. Why can a person with diabetes be a member of the police force in the US and not be in Ireland? Well, it's because these rules are being challenged in those countries and winning!

In the UK, some NHS Ambulance Trusts, still have restrictions in place on people with diabetes who wish to be ambulance crew. But these restrictions are being challenged.

In the US a person with diabetes CAN be a firefighter or a police officer! You CAN be a commercial pilot in the UK and Canada but not in the US. This is being challenged also.

My point is if you have a dream, if you know what you want to do with your life, don’t let people put you off. If you feel that you are right for any of those careers, then go for it! Where there is a will there is a way!

Here's the video from MasterLab 2016 - well worth a watch!!

https://youtu.be/Cmw31JpoZbE

I had hoped to publish part 2 of Diabetes Discrimination along with this post but Ha! Intentions were good but time did not cooperate. Part 2 next week!

Blood Glucose Diary Faker

Renza from Diabetogenic wrote this piece on "fudging" our bg numbers in our blood glucose diaries and it fuelled my fire. It’s such a coincidence that we both attended conferences where the “Fake” blood glucose diary of a person with diabetes was held as an example of a “bad” patient! Renza’s piece is well worth a read on how she handled the situation and spoke up for all of us. She rocks!! My experience was more of the sitting quietly at the back in disbelief that this was how this conference was beginning. The conference I attended focused on changing the way care is delivered to young adults with diabetes.

I was diagnosed as a young adult - age 20. The instant I saw that photo and heard those words I had vivid flashbacks. I remember doing that! I even remember why! I remember that every out of range blood glucose number in my diary was questioned, I felt interrogated and I never knew the answer. Back then, there was no carb counting and no one told me that if I ate more food but still took the same amount of insulin that my blood glucose levels would be higher. It wasn’t bad behaviour or poor choices - it was ignorance. I remembered being lost, feeling so isolated and not knowing anything about diabetes, let alone how to manage it. I remember that I never felt I could ask for help with my diabetes from my health care team.

I did it because I didn’t want to be judged or reprimanded for something I thought had no control over. I was letting my diabetes team down.

This conference, supposedly, about health care professionals finding a better way to deliver care but this made me feel like the reason young people with diabetes were not doing well was their own fault.

What should have been said, and said clearly, was that if a person with diabetes feels they have to hide their blood glucose numbers from their diabetes team the patient is the one being failed. That the diabetes team are to ones letting the patient down. That your reaction to people’s blood glucose diarys need some work. That the fact that a patient has actually written down their blood glucose numbers at all is an achievement to be celebrated. That you, despite your best intentions, are being judgemental.

Thankfully, these days, I am much older and wiser and more assertive these days. And of course, there's the fact that I don't care very much what other people think of me. I do ask for help - it's not always available but I keep asking. I also have a team that seem to be a bit more open to conversation about what I need. But I am a little perturbed that 20+ years later, young people with diabetes STILL feel that they have to cheat to pass their diabetes test?

Oh and BTW, I ALWAYS use the same pen to write down my BG numbers cos I keep the same pen in the case with my bg meter!! So this is not an effective way to flush out or prove a diary is being faked.

How many people actually use a written diary these days not anyway? Aren’t we all uploading to software programmes or using Apps?

Empowerment and Diabetes - My Journey

Last May, I was asked by the organisers of the Future Health Summit to give a presentation on how I became an empowered person with diabetes. Some friends asked if I could blog about it. The reason for my topic choice was because the theme of the conference was Empowering the Patient, Information, Choice & Accountability and I decided to focus on Empowering the Patient element for my presentation. I feel like I am one, that diabetes does not have power over me, I have a lot of power over it.

The journey towards being an empowered patient didn’t happen overnight, for me. I would like to think that a person with diabetes diagnosed today would find empowerment much quicker than I did. But the two core elements that were pivotal in my journey didn’t really exist when I was diagnosed. Those elements were Diabetes Education & Support.

Obviously my Journey Began with diagnosis 23 years ago - 1993. Diabetes Education was extremely basic in Ireland back then, if it existed at all!

My diabetes management involved;

• Injecting a fixed amount of insulin twice every day

• Eating the same amount of food at the same time every day

• Checking Blood Glucose levels just twice every day

• And I was taught How to recognise & treat a hypo

For those first 6 years I felt like I blindly coasted through my diabetes care. I did what I was asked to but I had no idea why I was doing any of it, except to stay alive.

So what changed? What prompted me to get on the bus to empowerment?

This is going to sound corny but it was love. In 1999, I met this bloke.

Phil

This is Phil. We weren’t going out very long but he already had notions about our relationship and we weren’t going out for very long when he asked me for books or leaflets where he could learn more about helping me manage my diabetes. I was stunned! And for three reasons;

• He was the first person I met who didn’t expect me to educate him on something I barely knew myself.

• That the relationship was moving a bit faster than I had thought and

• that I had nothing, absolutely nothing to give him when it came to information.

What I did have was access to the internet at work. So the next day, during my lunch break, I “AltaVista’d” type 1 diabetes. If you don’t know what AltaVista is, google it! :-D

I couldn’t believe what I found - the list of websites containing information was so long. I found all of these organisations with websites that had tonnes of practical information such as the Joslin Diabetes Centre and the world’s leading research organisation, the JRDF. I had never heard of these places before.

I started reading all of this information before handing it over to Phil and it got me thinking that there might be a better way to live with diabetes. But that thinking got shelved for a while as this journey is not an express route and it required a couple of transfers to reach my destination.

1st Transfer–Diabetes Education

You’ll be happy to know that I, very quickly, realised Phil was a keeper and by 2003, we had been married a couple of years, had moved to US and we were thinking about starting a family. As soon as my endocrinologist heard this he marched me off to a dietitian to learn about counting carbohydrates, insulin dose adjustment and sliding scales.

I had been diagnosed 10 years by the time I found diabetes education which now seems too long. But this knowledge gave me some of the control over this thing called diabetes for the first time. And I felt supported; supported by my diabetes team and supported with knowledge. I didn’t realised it then but my diabetes team in the US was the first I experience of patient centred care.

Family 1

family 2

2nd Transfer–Diabetes Peer Support

The 2nd transfer on my journey towards empowerment was finding peer support.

By 2007, we had moved back to Ireland, had our second baby and I was increasingly frustrated and unhappy with the diabetes care I was receiving. In June of that year I found myself at my lowest point after leaving the most humiliating diabetes appointment I’ve ever experienced. But it propelled me into action. I knew there had to be someone out there who would make me feel listened to.

I went home and remembered a recent newspaper article about a new branch of Diabetes Ireland being set up in Clare. I called the number in the piece and the lady who answered was a fellow person with type 1 diabetes. What are the odds? She had had her second baby around the same time as I had and we were both new to Clare. We instantly connected and during the course of that conversation we realised that we both wanted to meet more people like us and to do this was to set up diabetes support groups.

By the end of 2007, we had diabetes support groups and they continue to be a source of information, motivation and inspiration for me. And they, with some information from Diabetes Ireland helped me find a diabetes team that works amazing for me.

support group

Destination Reached - Person Empowered

This is where I feel my journey towards empowerment was completed. I had reached my destination.

Yes, I took the scenic route to being an empowered person with diabetes. An empowered person with diabetes who can drive her own diabetes. And I became that by finding two very simple, very basic diabetes resources but yet they are not accessible to everyone with diabetes in Ireland.

The first necessity is Diabetes education is as important as giving someone who wants to drive a car lesson and some theory. Would you really put a beginner in the driving seat of a car without it? And not just structured diabetes Education, like the university style of lectures. This education has to be an ongoing 2-way conversational style of learning, where a person with diabetes can grow in confidence, drive their own diabetes and the instructor takes more of a back seat each time.

The second is Diabetes Support and for me that comes from three sources;

• At home - I may be the person with diabetes but my whole family lives with it. The more supported I am at home the more successful I will be in my diabetes management.

• My Diabetes team - My journey has taught me that I need a health care team who listens to me, acknowledges all that I do to manage my care and doesn’t just focus my failings. A team that continues to teach me and a team that continues to learn.

• My diabetes Peers – the most undervalued, underused resource available for people with diabetes today. Who else knows what it’s like to live with diabetes than other people with it. We learn so much from sharing our experiences, so much that can’t be taught in a hospital appointment.

So while my journey towards empowerment has been completed, my life with diabetes journey still continues. And I hope to continue that journey for many, many decades.

Irish Blog Awards Long list

Aaaageees ago you may remember that I ask for you to nominate this blog and the Thriveabetes blog for an Irish Blog Award. Well, guess what!!!! We all made the long list!!! Both Thriveabetes and Blood Sugar Trampoline are in the Best Health & Wellbeing Blog category. And Blood Sugar Trampoline is also in the Best Blog Post category. I'm afraid I could not pick from all the amazing blog posts from all of you to nominate one for Thriveabetes.

So what's next in this award process.

Well, now I have to wait and see if we make it onto the short list and the judging criteria for this is;

• Is the blog regularly updated (at least once a month on average)? Yes
• Does the design support or interfere with the reading experience? Yes & No, I think?
• Is the blogger passionate about and knowledgeable about the subject? YES! YES!!!! and YES!
• How easy is the blog to navigate? Uuumm yees?
• Is the blog responsive to PC, mobile and tablet browsing? Yes

If we make the short list the next stage will be some of the dreaded Public Voting. And I suck at it!!!

"The shortlisted blogs will be opened up to a Public Vote so the more you promote your entry the better. The Public Vote is worth 20% of the overall mark (the other 80% is decided by our judging panel). To help you out we will send you “vote now” buttons which you can use on your blog and social media." from the Littlewoods Ireland Blog Awards webpage.

While awards don't make the blog it would be nice to create more awareness of diabetes and the support available for people living with diabetes. You can never have enough awareness, and that is for sure.

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Treasures from the Diabetes Online Community

Every now and again the DOC sends you something wonderful in real life, or in this case someone wonderful, who you would never have met otherwise. And I feel lucky that I've had a couple of those opportunities already this year. On Saturday last, I met one such person; Gina Gaudefroy. I don't know how Gina found me last year but she did and sent me an email. We exchanged some of our stories in a couple more emails. Gina shared that she is originally from Limerick but now lives in California. She is very involved in her diabetes community and in participating in many clinical trials. Her diabetes clinic is one of the few participating in the Bigfoot Biomedical Open APS trial and the ViaCyte transplant trials.

Last week, she messaged me saying she was going to be in Ireland, staying in Co. Offaly and could we meet? Hold up! My first question was what the hell are you doing in Offaly, very close to where I grew up? My Irish nosiness kicked in. It turns out that Gina's father comes from there.

I waited until she arrived to quiz her more about her ancestors, in true Irish tradition. And gave her some of my family history to return with so that she could determine if anyone in any of our families knew each other. And yes! Not only do we have diabetes in common but her father's people know my people!

Our paths may never have crossed or a connection made if it had not been for social media in particular the DOC. Our diabetes prompted us to connect personally but now we have lots more reasons to stay in touch. :-D

Diabetes gone Wild on Holiday

It's summer, which means for a lot of people it's holiday time. “They” say that diabetes never takes a holiday but what “they” don’t tell you is that when you take a holiday you should be warned that your diabetes will behave as if it’s gone wild in Ibiza and partying like it’s 1999. I took a holiday for the last couple of weeks. I didn’t go anywhere though. My brother in law and his family were visiting from America, hubby took ten days off work and the kids are on their summer break, so I decided it was a good idea to take a break too. No emails, no posting, very little facebook and twitter (let’s be honest - zero facebook while FFL was going on in Florida was just out of the question:-)

We did lots of day trips, lots of sightseeing, lots of driving, lots of eating out and almost no downtime. One day there could be lots of walking, the next was lots of time in the car. This is my diabetes worst nightmare!

My high and low blood glucose alarms went off a lot! Food that I thought might be low carb turned out not to be. Trying to schedule bathroom breaks around optimal blood glucose checking times was challenging. It was all exhausting. My diabetes broke all of the rules, even the ones that I had it well trained in. It decided that all bets were off.

For the biggest part, the holiday was soo much fun with fun people. But I’m ever so glad to be chillin’ at home with the kids for the rest of the summer.