Yesterday, I responded to the question about "things you wish your doctors knew about diabetes and the daily task of living [with it] by mentioning that many healthcare providers' knowledge of diabetes is incomplete and/or out of date. Rather than be a part of the problem, I've proposed a first-draft solution — some things I would put into a Continuing Medical Education (CME) syllabus to fill in some of those gaps. I'm sure I'm missing rather a chunk of stuff, but then again, this is a first draft.

If I were to develop a syllabus to fill in the gaps in professional diabetes education, as I perceive they exist today, these are some of the things I would consider:

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Other than the expected shock, you never know how you'll react to someone passing away in front of your eyes -- or while you are en route to a critically-ill relative -- until it happens. I don't usually experience grief in terms of torrents of tears. I do experience a degree of depression, and psychological paralysis, and for months afterward (sometimes even years!) I think I see deceased people walking in crowds (they're pretty obviously someone else who looks similar). Right now, logistics are the only thing in my mind.

Logistics -- not that my mother has left this world, and my father is in his own Alzheimer's world. How are we going to make sure my sister can continue to survive? How are we going to deal with personal effects? What can we keep, and how do we sell what must be sold? How are we going to foot the unpaid bills of burial -- not to mention whatever emergency-room bills follow?

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It's a bit late, but I figured I owed you all an update on the 2011 Web Warren Cookie Labs' season.

The Brown-Suited Elves delivered our 15-lb carton of Christmas Magic on the eve of 21 December, as expected. We shipped eight types of cookies, plus spiced pecans. Because our printer was refusing to, well, print, we couldn't do a funny little Christmas poem like we did last year. Instead, we printed up a "shipping manifest" over at the UPS Store. The elves there wear black with gold trim. Sadly, we found evidence of gremlins in their printer drivers, so instead of pretty, double-sided printing, we ended up with five pages of manifest-and-ingredients-list. 

This year, the Web Warren cookie spread consisted of: (READ MORE)

One of the earliest "grown-up" movies I remember seeing in the cinema was a comedy called Cold Turkey, starring Dick Van Dyke. The premise was that a small town would win what, for them, was an obscenely large amount of money if everybody in the entire town could stop smoking, "cold turkey" — that is, suddenly, as if the "off" button had been pressed and the power disconnected — for an entire month. The lengths the town fathers went to, to win, and the lengths the tobacco company went to, to ensure they didn't, made for laughter and hijinks that were accessible to even middle-school children.

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Between the High Holy Days, my upcoming JDRF walk, and online friends who are mourning recent losses, the deceased have been on my mind lately.

More specifically, those who have been lost to diabetes -- whether as a patient or as a victim of someone Driving While Low -- as well as those with diabetes who have died, but not from diabetes.

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Last week, a rabbi I follow on Twitter mentioned that she was beginning to work on her sermons for the Jewish High Holy Days. A bit off-the-cuff, I threw out the topic of "G-d forgiveness, versus self-forgiveness, versus forgiving one's fellow man". While the first of these sits squarely within the framework of religion, the other two often sit at the same table as the many theories of diabetes management. Especially where caregivers, and type 2 diabetes, are concerned.

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