World Diabetes Day 2016 and Blogaversary 4

londontoparisSo maybe this blogging was a fad after all, I’ve hardly kept it up-to-date, happy instead to read the blogs of some of the community’s new bloggers, like Amber.

Real life is more important right now

In fact it’s not just the blog which has taken a back seat to real life, Diabetes has too, well at least it has for Amy.

Aim for the sky Amy, diabetes won’t stop you

Life for Amy has just been so busy at the moment, with school, with friends, with gigs, with hobbies.
She’s decided to aim for the sky as far as education goes, striving to get herself into a position to apply to undertake a medical degree at one the UK’s most prestigous universities. At this stage whether she gets there or not is neither here nor there but one thing’s for sure: she has not considered that having Type 1 will stop her in her quest.
With the attitude to life and diabetes she has I have absolute faith she will achieve major successes in life.

Technology takes a back seat…

November 2015 saw Amy going to strength to strength with Nightscout and her Pebble watching displaying her glucose levels.
Then her Pebble broke and I never got round to fixing it.
Then eventually she decided that she wanted a break from CGM when her Dexcom G4 transmitter battery died.
From a parental point of view and especially as a member of the Nightscout UK team I’ve found it a little difficult to come to terms with a lack of CGM data, after a couple of years relying on it.
BUT, this is Amy’s diabetes, this is her choice and regardless of what I’d prefer I must respect her decision.
For the moment she’s wearing the occasional Libre and this is generally working very well for her, giving her poor fingers a rest from jabbing with a lancet. Libre is enabling her to see her data and we’re taking such a back seat that I have not looked at any of her data, whatsoever.
We’re so lucky that Amy is on top of her diabetes and things are going well, if she wasn’t and things weren’t maybe we wouldn’t be so relaxed, but for the time being technology is not the answer.

But Thank God for technology

One year ago today we were waking up to the morning after the terroist attacks in Paris.
I’d taken Jane to Paris for her birthday celebrations, it was the first time we’d ever left the kids (aged almost 18 and 15) alone, so it’s darn typical we’d go on that weekend to that city.
But Thank God for Nightscout, which enabled us to take that well needed break, knowing that we could see how Amy was and if needed get help to her, or nudge her sister into helping, or so on.
Without Nightscout, we’d never gone away that weekend.
Without Nightscout, Jane and I would never had the fantastic time we had.

A year of presentations

For me, this last twelve months have been somewhat challenging, but has brought forward some fantastic opportunities and experiences. I’ve always hated public speaking, in fact I won’t even speak up in a pub or a group, preferring instead to listen to everyone else, so the idea of doing presentations used to freak me out.
After the presentations at CWD FFL 2015 I’ve launched into seeking opportunities to present Nightscout to other families and health care professionals, all for awareness only.
First it was the opportunity to visit the Houses of Parliament with INPUT Diabetes for the Medical Technology Awareness meeting.
Back in January, along with Stuart, Kate and Amy, we presented two long (1.5hours) presentations to JDRF and Diabetes UK, giving them a run through of everything Nightscout.
A few days later I got the great opportunity to present about our life with T1 at Dr Partha Kar’s TalkT1 event, and of course slipped in a fair few slides about Nightscout, try stopping me.
Then in April Dr May Ng asked me to present at the CYP North-west education day, talking about our life with Diabetes and of course Nightscout and OpenAPS got some slides too.
Again in April I presented Nightscout to the National Diabetes Psychologists meeting.
This year of presentations culminated with my biggest opportunity yet: presenting Nightscout to NHS England. Again this was done purely for their awareness, our Nightscout team of presenters (me, Kate, Matt) expected nothing but we got so much more – blimey, just realised I never blogged about this…must do that soon.

And some fundraising too

I was amazed that my ‘let’s get a team of Diabetes Dads cycle London Nightrider‘ post on our Facebook group resulted in a team of around 30, raising close to £20,000 for JDRF. I enjoyed all the organising of this and giving us Diabetes Dads the chance to meet up.
I’m also pleased to have helped my friend Kelly organise of group of 16 of us to cycle from London to Paris. Between them they raised thousands for several local Diabetes charities, enabling the purchase of CGM to help others in need.

A few other things I’m proud of

Getting Carlo to link his Libre-scanning Glimp app to Nightscout.
In April as part of promoting Diabetes UK’s 100 Things book, Jane, Amy and I appeared on a local TV channel. It’ll be the one and only time I let my eyebrows get a media outing. I was really proud of Jane and Amy, they did brillantly.
JDRF’s Type1Catalyst event saw both me and Amy in Parliament, unfortunately though for Amy several hours walking around Camden meant she spent most of the time in Parliament trying to get out of a hypo.
I’m proud to be one of the founding members of the new T1 Resources web site. Sophie and Mike really have done a great job of organising such a great resource.
Most recently I’ve enjoyed being a judge for the QIC Diabetes Awards.

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One Response to World Diabetes Day 2016 and Blogaversary 4

  1. Wow kev you really have achieved alot, those sound like some amazing adventures for T1. Well done to you Jane and Amy.

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