I'm no politician, but my day job does involve shaking the hands of many strangers. In the "normal" (i.e., non-diabetes-related) world, this is no big deal -- if the other person's hand is really icky, just use some hand sanitizer and be done with.

In the 1980's, AIDS-phobia taught us otherwise.

At the beginning of the "AIDS epidemic", we understood that any random person could carry what was believed to be a highly-virulent, always-deadly human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), and that any direct person-to-person contact risked exchanging the body fluids through which the disease was transmitted. One big casualty of that was the willingness of people to shake hands with strangers. The jobs I had during that time kept me relatively insulated from sweat-exchanging contact with the general public, so I don't remember what -- if anything -- replaced that gesture of connection, of acknowledging someone's identity, of drawing someone into your business or social circle.

Fortunately, our understanding of HIV has changed -- we now understand that non-sexual transmission of the virus requires an exchange of blood.

Which is where diabetes comes into the picture.

Western culture has a number of taboos surrounding our reactions to blood. Some people will grow ill or faint not just at the sight of blood itself, but even at the scars that pay witness to someone else's having bled in the past. We hesitate to touch bloody wounds barehanded not from fear of AIDS and other blood-borne illnesses, but from fear of contaminating those wounds with whatever germs we ourselves might be carrying. Biblical admonitions prevent us from eating raw meat or drinking blood, or even eating cooked blood.

And G-d forbid we should shake another's hands while our own are contaminated by fresh blood -- whether that blood be ours, or someone else's.

Yet visible blood and diabetes management go hand in hand, if you'll pardon the pun. Our fingers bleed every time we test our blood glucose levels. "Bad pricks" and "gusher sites" leave our fingers -- and often, everything else we touch -- covered in blood. We have micro-wounds and micro-scars dotting our fingers to the point that some people with Type 1 diabetes have reported them altering their very fingerprints (talk about being identified by our diabetes!). Many of us also have the habit of licking our microwounds, mixing saliva with those last drying drops of blood.

Sounds pretty gross, right?

So... what are we to do when we get one of those fingersticks which, after appearing to dry up correctly, turn around and start marking our work environments in blood? Besides keeping hand sanitizer, wet hand wipes, and/or prep packets nearby -- besides letting others assume our hands are clean (and us assuming the same of them) -- how do we, should we, deal with "pressing the flesh" when our hands are a bloody mess?