Since I missed this week's Diabetes Social Media Advocacy #dsma chat, I'm addressing this week's questions here. The topic was disclosure — who (and what institutions) do you let know you have diabetes, and who (or where) do you choose to keep in the dark.

1. To disclose or not disclose: do(es) your employer/school/friends know you have diabetes? Why or why not?

The company which employs me does not know that I have diabetes; several people at work (including my supervisors) do. There is neither place nor reason to mention diabetes (or any disability) on the job application — I believe it's actually illegal in the US to inquire before hiring — and since hiring/firing decisions are made at the store level, accommodations must be discussed and/or made at that level, rather than the corporate level.

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In most people with diabetes, lows occur either because we've overcalculated the amount of insulin we need, or because of an impaired, inhibited, or insufficient glycogen response. While this is obviously an oversimplification, I remember reading that either autoimmunity or modern insulins did weird things to the glycogen response in people with type 1 diabetes, and I know that at least one class of oral diabetes drugs works by inhibiting, if not completely blocking, that response. Then there's the issue of undereating, or not eating sufficiently, for there to be glycogen stores that can be easily converted to fuel our bodies — and, of course, drugs such as glipizide which work by stimulating additional insulin release.

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Today, the first Friday of February, is national "Wear Red" day in honor (or observance) of Women's Heart Health Awareness, as spearheaded by the "Go Red for Women" campaign. So of course I will be wearing red to work and I've been handing out Red Dress pins.

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In one of my high school English classes, we had to read Samuel Beckett's play of this name. Thirty-some-odd years later, I don't remember the details, only that it centered around two men who seemed to be relatively old, penniless, and alone. They met at a particular spot each day, left each evening, and could only remember one day past and think towards one day forward. They awaited a third character, the eponymously named "Godot", who never arrived. The style was considered existentialist in that there wasn't all that much character development: what you saw was what you got. While I never read the French original, in English, "Godot" seemed a thinly-veiled metaphor for "G-d" — and since old, penniless (and possibly homeless) folk have always had the shortest from-this-point life expectancy, it made sense — at least on one level — that these two characters were waiting to die.

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There have been a couple of recent threads on LinkedIn regarding the definition of a "cure" for diabetes.

As everyone here who takes insulin will agree, diabetes cannot be "cured" by diet alone. And as everyone whose diabetes is currently controlled in part, or entirely, by diet and exercise will agree, just like "insulin is not a cure", "eating the right foods" is not a cure, either.

Merriam-Webster defines "cure (noun)" in our sense as the following:

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Put aside the images of the Kingston Trio's Boston-area rewrite of "The Ship That Never Returned" and think instead of a group of riders, runners, walkers, or drivers following one after the other, or a flock of migratory birds, or any group trying to travel a significant distance, using the strongest to protect the weakest from wind and weather, each member of the group taking a turn at the front to allow the others to recover.

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