Category Archives: DBlogWeek2014

Sunday’s topic: As we wrap up another Diabetes Blog Week, let’s share a few of our favourite things from the week. This can be anything from a #DBlogWeek post you loved, a fantastic new-to-you blog you found, a picture someone included in a post that spoke to you, or comment left on your blog that made you smile. Anything you liked is worth sharing!

All of the newest things I’ve found and loved have come from #DBlogWeek itself.

I love how some people have starting blogging because of #DBlogWeek and they’ve made such great starts I hope they continue. I’d like to single out Diane for this and her brand new blog: “My 1st ever Blog”. Kate too had only blogged twice before launching into a full week of blogging for #DBlogWeek: katet1d’s Blog.

I love how some others who’d blogged a little before have really gone for it this week. For this I’ll single out Jules who’s had a pretty crap time recently but is always full of fun and laughter and this comes through in her blog, especially the line in Mantras and More: ‘I’ve got the wrong mirror in my house. Mine belongs to a dowdy middle aged chubster, not me!‘. That had me giggling for a while, mainly because I share the same mirror problems 🙂

I’ve found a renewed zest for blogging. The early Circles of Blue articles were hard to write as they dealt with diagnosis, but as hard as they were I felt better by writing them. More recently I’ve just been reporting on events/products and whilst some of these – especially the Accu-chek Insight pump page – have turned out to be my most visited pages writing them didn’t give me much satisfaction. I think it’s fair to say this week has been a revelation for me.

I think I may write the odd poem too. I can’t tell you how nervous I was to release Tuesday’s poem “A Childhood All Gone” but it turned out to be the single-most favourited, retweeted and commented on article I’ve written. I spent all day apologising for making people cry – even though they told me I didn’t need to – and I’ve had people ask to be able to print it out for their clinic – of course you can – for others to read. I was pretty much overwhelmed the whole day. The last person who probably read it was Amy herself; she approved…phew!

Lastly, I’m amazed by Karen Graffeo. Not only has she grown #DBlogWeek to 200 worldwide bloggers, she seems to find time to read as many of the blogs as possible and comment on them, giving praise and encouragement. Here’s a couple she left me.

Saturday’s topic:Back for another year, let’s show everyone what life with diabetes looks like! With a nod to the Diabetes 365 project, let’s grab our cameras again and share some more d-related pictures. Post as many or as few as you’d like. Feel free to blog your thoughts on or explanations of your pictures, or leave out the written words and let the pictures speak for themselves.

It’s quite an easy one this. It was taken yesterday as my thirteen year old daughter Amy took to the stage with other older teenagers to talk about the care they receive, transition and what their ideal service would be. I’m immensely proud of Amy for doing this, it’s not something I would fancy doing.

If you want to read about the event yesterday it’s all in here: Amy’s Chat Show at the National Paediatric Diabetes Team Meeting.

Friday’s topic:Share the (non-medical) tips and tricks that help you in the day-to-day management of diabetes. Tell us everything from clothing modifications, serving size/carb counting tricks to the tried and true Dexcom-in-a-glass trick or the “secret” to turning on a Medtronic pump’s backlight when not on the home-screen. Please remember to give non-medical advice only!

Crikey, this is a difficult, ‘tips and tricks’ would imply we know what we’re doing! If only we had Dexcom with its own received we could have Dexcom-in-a-glass, sadly we don’t.

I suppose the purchase of a non-diabetes-related SPIbelt for Amy has worked well for carrying her insulin pump, whenever she hasn’t got a pocket or somewhere to clip it.
When going swimming straight after our second pump training session, which taught us about adjusting for exercise, we realised we had nowhere for her to clip her pump. A quick dash around the shops later the hurriedly-purchased girl’s waist-cinching belt worked a treat and looked pretty cool too.
Both these products go to prove that you don’t always need to purchase specially made/designed diabetes products to make life easier, there’s things available everywhere.

On certain items of clothing we’ve done a little snip of a seam or rear or inside of a pocket to enable the pump’s tube to be fed through, but everyone does this right?

There’s a hack I want to know about: for those pumping insulin how do you avoid those untanned circles where cannulas once sat when returning from a beach holiday? Do you revert to MDI? Do you change set every day? Or something else?

The best ‘hack’ I’ll save for last and I’d like to thank UnderstudyPancreas‘s Annie for what I believe to have initiated a major change in Amy’s life with diabetes. Let me explain: Amy disliked going to clinic appointments, not because of the appointment itself which was always fine, but because we tried to keep her out of school for the minimum time. That meant picking her up from school with just enough time to rush to the hospital, park, run up the stairs, book in, do the clinic and reverse the steps all the way back to school. I heard that Annie’s daughter’s clinic were a lot more relaxed so on the next clinic we changed our ways. Now Amy has the whole day of school, she wakes up later than normal, has a leisurely breakfast, we drive to the park&ride with ample time to get to the hospital and book into the clinic, we spend as long at the clinic as we need and then head off into Winchester. There we’ll have a leisurely lunch, mooch around the shops and maybe at some point think about going home. Now before anyone jumps up and says it’s wrong to do this let me just share that at school she’s in the top 20 in her year of 300, something which has improved since treating her clinics as days off. Now couple that with Amy’s attitude towards clinic days: she loves them and looks forward to them*. Enough said I think.

 

 

 
* obviously she doesn’t like the annual check up where they extract what seems like gallons of blood from her. Who would?