A number of you left comments on my post about leaving little clues about my diabetes diagnosis for my boss in an email. Several of you were pretty critical of my actions.

Long-time readers of my blog, though, will know that I’ve decided to take a different approach at my new job. When I was diagnosed, I was less than a year into a job I loved with people I loved and respected. I had no problem telling just about everyone about my diagnosis. In fact, I felt relieved knowing everyone knew.

When I started my last job in May, it was important to me that the people I worked with knew about my diagnosis and how to treat me if I was having problems. I decided to take a different approach with my new new job that I started in August. I decided not to talk about diabetes, to make sure I had adequate supplies to treat a low, to go about my daily diabetes life, to attempt to seamlessly integrate this disease into my work life.

That post was not meant to "bemoan" my boss's possible lack of knowledge or understanding about diabetes. It was meant simply to show one slice of work-life with diabetes, particularly since not everyone with diabetes is "out." And, yes, if a friend of mine or co-worker had a chronic illness, I would learn as much about it as I could.

Right now I’m teetering on a fine line. On one hand I really want to just come out and say, “look guys I have diabetes so if I’m ever acting weird or if I ever ask you to get me a regular soda, this is why”, and be able to answer questions about diabetes, blood sugar management and my pump. (I suspect they already know since I'm not secretive about testing or my pump.) And on the other hand I want to be able to take care of it myself and just have it fade into the background.

Some of you have wondered, rather bluntly, why it’s so important for other people to know we have diabetes. It’s incredibly important mainly from a safety standpoint. We can’t control everything when it comes to diabetes. No matter how well controlled we are, no matter how many times we test, no matter how carefully we count carbs there are still variables that we can’t always account for.

I can think of two instances right now where I thought I did everything right and still ended up at 29 and 40. And how absolutely thrilled was I to have had people with me or near me who understood the urgency of “Can you get me a non-diet soda?”