Friday ramblings

I'm in bed as I type, courtesy of some bug that's been floating around the family and the office.

Despite diabetes I'm usually fairly healthy, but diabetes means my immune system doesn't work as well as it should. My blood sugars have been high all day, and wouldn't go down even with extra insulin. That gave me a chance to think about how I felt, and I had to admit to having caught something. Oh well, hopefully I'll be back on my feet before the weekend is out.

So here are a few links for Friday. I hope everyone has a wonderful Veteran's Day weekend. Keep our military men and women in your prayers, they need our support.



Today is D-blog day. If you're new to the blogosphere, you'll find lots of great bloggers writing about diabetes-related issues.



I've mentioned the diabetes search engine before. Right now it uses Google technology to search over 750 sites for information about diabetes. I'm probably adding around 20 sites a week to the engine so hopefully it's getting more useful over time. And the money that's raised by advertising revenue goes to diabetes research causes. Please try it out and let me know what you think. If you know of a good diabetes site that's not in there let know about that too.

Recently I found the SafeSittings web site. (The owner is a member of TuDiabetes.) What do they do?

SAFESITTINGS is a nationwide website that makes available teens with Type 1 diabetes as babysitters for children with diabetes. These teens have been managing their own care for many years. They understand the dangerous highs ands lows inherent in the disease and have the skills to test blood sugars, give insulin injections, adjust insulin pumps and treat hypoglycemia.

I imagine that for parents of children with diabetes, this might be a great service. And for teens with diabetes, it might be way to earn useful babysitting money and feel good about helping out a family. What a great concept!


I've been reading the Wall Street Journal Health Blog a lot. Good short articles about health-related issues. One of the recent posts is about the increase in use of adult meds by overweight children.

A small but growing number of children are taking medicines for high blood pressure, cholesterol and especially diabetes[my emphasis], according to an analysis presented at the American Public Health Association’s annual meeting in Washington this week. One big reason: childhood obesity.
...
Among the findings: America’s tweens, kids ages 10 to 14 more than doubled their use of type 2 diabetes meds during the studied period. Girls ages 10 to 14 showed a 166% increase. Still, the prevalence of use is still pretty low. For kids aged 15 to 19, the use of type 2 diabetes meds was only a tad more than one kid in a thousand in 2005.

So the bad news is that type 2 diabetes is on the rise in children. The good news (such as it is) that it's not a huge proportion, yet.

I wish there was an easy way to improve these statistics.

Yard sale

Labels: diabetes, health, nablopomo, veteran

posted by Bernard @ 7:23 PM 15 Comments Links to this post  

Are you a diabetes veteran?

Have you had diabetes for at least 20 years? What have you learned along the way?

I've created a group on the TuDiabetes.com web site for anyone who has had diabetes (any type) for 20 years or more.

Do you remember the good old days with Benedict's Solution? Or having to sharpen your hypodermic needles on a whetstone?

Maybe you've some anecdote to share that helped you in the early days of diabetes. Or you just want to celebrate the amount of time you've lived with this disease.

Whatever your reason, please consider joining the Diabetes Veterans group and letting others see how we've managed to make it this far.

Labels: diabetes, tudiabetes, veteran

posted by Bernard @ 9:18 PM 1 Comments Links to this post