After I got Diabetic Echoes up and running as a website, I noticed that my college campus needed a place for diabetics and those interested in diabetes. So I went about setting up the organization with my campus. It was a long process, which took careful planning and creativity.

The group started last semester with four members including myself. We met every other week to prepare for this semester, talk about the JDRF Walk, and discuss things that were happening in our diabetes lives. Finding other members proved difficult, although I wasn't ready to give up just yet (after all, we raised over $1000 for the JDRF Walk).

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My addiction with diabetes blogs began in September of 2006 when I stumbled upon the Diabetes OC. We had spent the first couple of years or so of Charlie’s diabetic life insulated in our own little world. For whatever reason, we rejected the notion of support groups, stubbornly thinking it could not help us.

But I was also going through my own honeymoon period in the very beginning, as Susanne says. I bought into the rosy notion that everything would be fine as long as we tested his blood sugar just four times a day and simply counted carbs correctly. When Susanne insisted that we get up every night, I sided with the doctors who said it wasn’t necessary. I was wrong. In doing this, Susanne took the lion’s share of the worrying during the first six months. (READ MORE)

The Web Warren

I am personally involved, to one degree or another, in several online diabetes communities and social networks. Each has a different
set of features and a different communal attitude -- but what they all have in common is that they provide a level of psychological support for their members. In each, I find members who credit these communities for their continued quality of life.

Today, many of us work crazy hours, or we're single parents who can't drop off the children to head to a traditional support-group
meeting, or we're transportation-limited in some way or another. Online communities are in many ways the evolution of traditional support
groups into the digital space, providing support that transcends time zones and physical distance.

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With a new year come new ideas, new resolutions, new solutions to old problems, and of course new problems needing solutions.

Among the last is, once again, need for a full-time job. Cell phone sales were not high enough to keep me on until Christmas, so I am once again navigating the waters of unemployment and job-search.

For now, enough of that. The meme going around the Diabetes Online Community has been that of "spreading the word" -- both telling people with diabetes of the online resources available to us, and bringing our online activism out to the world in which we live, visit our doctors, purchase our food and medications, and educate our children. While most of us talk about outreach in terms of getting our real-life neighbors to hook up with our online resources, I see a different reality.

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There's a reason I don't watch 9/11 memorials and retrospectives. I spent too many months breathing in the remains of the never-identified mixed with burning concrete, steel, and asbestos. For too many months, my previously-direct route into work was disrupted and made roundabout. For too many months, the scaffolding, National Guardsmen, barricaded streets, and ubiquitous grey dust left us worried of another attack that might complete the destruction that the attacks on the World Trade Center left half-done. I spent too many months wondering about what my religious responsibilities were to the families of those I never knew, whose loved ones' remains would remain as a body burden in my lungs, and too many months worrying about latent effects that might not show up until ten, twenty, or even thirty years after my exposure to that environment.

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