Re: Frequency of blood glucose monitoring in relation to glycemiccontrol in patients with type 2 diabetes.

Em wrote: 

Jenny,
When I was diagnosed 7 1/2 months ago I posted here.  I didn't know much
about diabetes at all and was really frightened.  You were one of the first
people to respond and your words were very encouraging and comforting.
Reading your research articles was a great start for me and very beneficial.
I appreciate the work you've put into researching and glad you've shared it.
A great big thank you from me, too!
Em


Em,

I hope you have been able to use what you've learned here to get good control of your own diabetes!

Thanks to you (and the other posters) for the kind words. They make me feel very good about the amount of time I've spent posting over the years. I can know intellectually that there are folks out there in the Great Beyond reading, but it is so abstract. Sometimes it feels like I am just writing to myself. But having people pipe up occasionally with messages like yours makes it real.

But I appreciate what the web means to people with health issues because 18 years ago, I was diagnosed (wrongly, it turned out) with another devastating disease, long before there were any online health resources. The doctor talked to me for about five minutes told me the diagnosis and shrugged that there wasn't much he could do.

I remember standing in a bookstore, tears running down my face as I read in a book that mentioned the condition briefly that people who had it often killed themselves or that if they didn't their husbands abandoned them.

The only way I could find information about that condition was to make a long drive to a medical school library and wait patiently until none of the students was using one of 3 research database computers. Then I'd have maybe 15 minutes to look up articles. It would cost me 10 cents a page to print them out. I contacted a support group and talked to a woman whose personal story was so horrible that it validated the idea that I was going to end up having to kill myself.

If I had had access to online help, there would have been so much more I could have learned to help me deal with the terrifying diagnosis (like, for example, that my symptoms didn't really match the disease the doctor had told me I had, and that even if it did there were a number of treatments worth trying!)

That I can sit now in my office, on a farm-filled country road and read journal articles in their entirety for free is still like a miracle.

Over the years I've learned that as awful as diabetes is, it has one huge advantage over most of the other chronic diseases people get--because it is one of the few diseases where there are things you can do that make a huge difference in your health. My friend with MS, for example, can't do much but try drugs, none of which seem to help, and diet does not make a difference in the progression of that disease which is completely unpredictable.

In contrast, though you can't 100% control diabetes, you don't just sit there wondering if you are going to go blind or lose your kidneys. You can get tests that correlate very closely to your chances of bad outcomes and you can do a lot to change those test results.

So that makes it all the more important to reach out and let people know what they can do.

In other diseases, like cancer, Alzheimer and MS, support groups are pretty much just about giving sympathy and sharing stories with people who understand. But with diabetes support means we can actually help each other live normal lives in good health.

If that isn't worth posting for, what is?
.

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