Diabetes Blog Week: Letter Writing Day

For today's topic in Diabetes Blog Week (see HERE for the different topics and wildcard subjects, and HERE for my post on the first day). Today's topic was borrowed from a February Wego Blog Carnival that asked participants to write letters to their conditions.

Particpants can write a letter to diabetes if they'd like, but the Diabetes Online Community was also taking it one step further. The suggestions: "How about writing a letter to a fictional (or not so fictional) endocrinologist telling the doctor what you love (or not) about them. How about a letter to a pretend (or again, not so pretend) meter or pump company telling them of the device of your dreams? Maybe you’d like to write a letter to your child with diabetes. Or a letter from your adult self to the d-child you were. Whomever you choose as a recipient, today is the day to tell them what you are feeling."

Wow!! Really.

I wish this was the topic all week, and certainly on day one, because I could write letters to so many parties, which can be incredibly therapeutic in it's own right. My letter to type 1 diabetes would certainly NOT be a love letter. I love nothing about diabetes, and it has sucked so much joy and happiness from so many lives in spite of reasonably good glycemic management. You can have all the inputs correctly, and still not get the outcome it is supposed to yield. WTF is that all about? I would describe diabetes kind of like having a second anus that could not truly be controlled, so get your Depends adult diapers ready!!

But I'm not going to do that today. Frankly, I have sooooooo much going on at work that I will be spending most of my evening finishing up several projects that are due in the next few days. As a result, I may still revisit this idea of writing letters again when time permits, but today I am going to write a letter to the Diabetes Online Community. Read on for more ...




Dear Diabetes Online Community,

First, thank all of you. This community has provided me and countless other individuals with diabetes with far more than the medical profession acknowledges. Perhaps the biggest contribution has been, for me anyway, the mental therapy you provide. I don't have to explain how managing type 1 diabetes frequently does not follow rules it's supposed to. Or how doctors have this insane notion that simply following the rules will yield consistently predictable outcomes. Or why the clinical question medicine SHOULD be answering is not why so many individuals with diabetes suffer from depression, but rather why a majority manage to escape depression?

My letter tonight is short and sweet. But I appreciate all of you and hope that collectively, we will be able to someday prove the clinical worth of having a community such as ours. The benefits are indeed genuine, and we will prove it someday, even if we don't have a medical journal submission ready today!

Beyond that, I will continue to enjoy our daily Twitter communications, weekly chats via Twitter on Wednesday evenings, reading your blogs daily, the radio show on BlogTalkRadio, pehaps video chats online at MyMeetingHub.com (Note: MyMeetingHub's services were discontinued at 9PM on October 30, 2011, but alternatives have emerged, such as Google Plus Hangouts enable video chats for up to 10 people ... on the fly) ... who knows what tomorrow might bring?!

I really must sign off now. Stay tuned for another letter (or two) at some point in the future!

Regards,
Scott Strumello