The theme for this week is "Manage Your Healthcare Team". 
For me, and for many others with Type 2 diabetes, this is a laugh. Team? What team? I have a primary care physician who handles everything from soup to nuts, including my diabetes care. She'll refer me to specialists and labs as needed, but she doesn't have any direct correspondence with my ophthalmologist (for whose checkup I am long overdue), and I've never had a CDE or an endo.

  (READ MORE)

The last time I saw Dr. R (my new endo's office), the lady who checked me in noticed that I had just been in the week before. She joked, "Has anything changed since the last time you were here?"

We said something about how often I'm at the office and she said (strangely since it is an endo's office), "Well hopefully you'll get the issue figured out."

"Nope," I said. "I'm a lifer."

They always ask if I have a primary care doctor. I had thought about asking Dr. R if she could be my PCP, but even without asking it seems clear that my internal medicine issues would be better served with an internist.

  (READ MORE)

How often has this question been debated?

Olivia doesn't care what she's called. She calls herself diabetic often. I'm the one with the issue. I always say that she has diabetes. To me, calling her a diabetic makes her only her disease.

On dLife a couple of weeks ago, Jim Turner said that he was always a diabetic, that diabetes was what he thought about, what was going on in the background all the time, no matter what else he was doing. He was, first and foremost, a diabetic.

I can understand that thought process, but I don't agree with it. Yes, diabetes takes up a lot of space in the brain and it's not something that can be shoved aside and forgotten. You always have to take it into consideration. But you take it into consideration along side your life. Your life as a person. A person with diabetes, yes, but a person with a life. A person who is a sister, daughter, student, drama queen and soccer player as well as a person with diabetes. (READ MORE)

While waiting for Olivia to take her swim test at Clara Barton last week, I was eavesdropping on a couple of girls standing in front of me. They scared the crap out of me.

They were both talking about how they hated having to take insulin because insulin makes you fat. "It's true," one girl said, "I read it on the internet." The other girl was amazed, but believed her readily.

Then they started discussing how they both let themselves run high - so high that their meters just say HI - in order to maintain or even lose some weight. They both said that they rarely checked themselves, maybe checked a couple of times a week, lied to their parents about the frequency of their checks and made up bg readings. At this point, my eyebrows were practically at my hairline and I was trying to unobtrusively move a little closer so I could continue to listen. (READ MORE)

I took Olivia to camp today. It's always a little bittersweet for me to take her there. I miss having her at home, I miss seeing her around the house, I even miss (god help me!) her incessant playing of Hannah Montana CDs.

I remember the first year she went to camp. I was terrified. She was eight years old and had never been away overnight, except to stay with family members. I knew that Clara Barton would be a safe place for her but there was a part of me that wanted to cling to her, to hold her close, thinking that no one, no one was going to take care of her the way I could.

That first year she only did mini-camp. She stayed from Sunday until Thursday. When I went to pick her up, she bubbled over with stories of what they'd done, telling me about this girl and that girl, talking enthusiastically about their activities and games. It was wonderful to see her that enthusiastic. (READ MORE)

Olivia has had diabetes for almost ten years now. The first few years were a struggle, emotionally and blood sugar-wise. I felt like I'd gone back to school - I had to learn this new language, this new way of life and it was hard.

It's been so long now, though, that diabetes care is pretty much second nature for us. We all look at carb information on packages of food, we're all really good at guessing when that information isn't there. I've talked about this stuff with my family, too. I thought they were on board with it all. I didn't expect them to be as expert as I am (and believe me, I know I could always know more), but I thought they'd at least gleaned information from all of my speeches over the years. (READ MORE)