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?
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.
In February, when we were living in a very different pre-coronavirus world, I was invited to a local secondary school by a small group of TY (transition year) students who were doing a Young Social Innovators project on diabetes. They asked me to talk about what living with diabetes is like for me. Here’s what we talked about.
Dangerous omission of adult onset type 1 diabetes in symptoms campaign. This issue is very personal to me because I have met so many people diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in the 30’s, 40’s and beyond. I also know that type 1 diabetes in adults is frequently misdiagnosed and I suspect this may have resulted in fatalities that we don’t yet know about.
I’ve been reading some of my old posts looking for inspiration for new ones and came across this one below which I first published in April 2011 about some of the stuff I went through in my early days of being a newly diagnosed person with diabetes. I was struck by how I wrote about trying to heed advice on being able to live a “normal life” after being diagnosed and how I just did not want to talk about it with my friends. I’m glad things have changed for me.
