I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes twenty-five years ago. Twenty-five years is a long time to live with something. It is an especially long time to live with something that requires tight control. Twenty-five years is enough time to have seen lots of bad days, lots of good days, and lots and lots of in betweens. And it is enough time for me to have had the good fortune of seeing vast improvements in access to information and treatment, developments and improvements in technology and even some improvements in (GASP!) what health insurers are willing to cover. (READ MORE)

I'm in the middle of preparing a presentation for my computer user group on "Connected Medical Devices" -- that is to say, durable medical equipment that has the ability to connect to a smartphone, a computer, or the Internet for the purpose of maintaining a log of data points, keeping track of one or more patients' health, or helping one manage his own health.

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“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world – the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” -- George Bernard Shaw

A high school friend wrote this in my yearbook, with the exhortation to "be reasonably unreasonable". I've often said that one of my particular, err, talents is to see things from a perspective that is markedly different from everyone else's -- "to turn things on their ear", as it were. While I often gain perverse pleasure from finding a previously-unexplored viewpoint and making it public -- very public -- this trait often allows me to see important truths that may have been hidden to others, and to present them in a relatively reasoned manner.

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Most of the time I try not to dwell on the fact that I am old enough to qualify for AARP membership. Excepting the gray hair, my self-image is that of a woman in her early to mid thirties. This shouldn't seem too odd if you consider how much I've "reversed" in getting my diabetes, blood pressure, and cholesterol under control, working out, and training for my first half-century bicycle ride. Count backwards eight years from forty-two, and well...

Still, the clues of age are there: the bifocals I've had for at least five years, the progression of cold-intolerance, the increasing frequency with which I feel physical stress from repetitive motions, and the tendency to remind everyone that during the 1974 Watergate hearings, the phrase "(expletive deleted)" became, in itself, an expletive... (READ MORE)