I’m still having difficulty accepting Twitter as a source of news, but nonetheless, I was interested by the tweets of Elliott Yamin, the Type 1 diabetic and former American Idol contestant who was in Chile during this weekend’s devastating earthquake. If you’d like to read the full text of some of his tweets, check out Access Hollywood – my 160-character limit doesn’t allow me to fully express his creative use of abbreviations. But what interested me is his perspective on the disaster as a Type 1 diabetic....

I was nervous about the second week of my trip, which I spent in Estonia. For the first time since being diagnosed with diabetes, I was completely on my own. I took a plane from Riga to Tallinn, Estonia’s capital. From Tallinn, I took a bus and a ferry to Saaremaa, an island off the western Estonian coast. Saaremaa is Estonia’s largest island. The land is mostly flat, punctuated by meteorite craters; the largest crater, known as Kaali Lake, is almost circular and filled with water. The one town on Saaremaa is Kuressaare, which...

A few weeks ago I received a notice from the organizers of the Tel Aviv marathon announcing that the marathon had been postponed from March 26th to May 13th .The postponement is due to a disagreement between the police, the sponsors (Adidas) and the city regarding the course of the race. Only someone with absolutely no understanding of the kind of training that goes in to marathon running could decide to postpone a marathon six weeks before it is set to take place. Last year the Tel Aviv marathon took place on April 24th, on a relatively...

I really enjoyed reading Elizabeth Snouffer’s article “Eating Abroad with Diabetes–Hong Kong,” Catherine Price’s interview with world traveller Bridget McNulty, and Catherine’s posts  describing her own trips to Tokyo and Hawaii. So I thought I would follow the trend and write about my own first experience traveling with diabetes. This summer, I went on a two-week trip to Estonia and Latvia to do research about my grandfather’s family. I had originally been given a grant to do this last summer, right after I had...

I just returned from a trip to Tokyo for work and am finally over my jet-lag and settling back into my old routine.  It was a crazy week: not much sleep, constantly walking, and encountering carb-laden foods wherever I turned. Soba noodles for breakfast, tempura with rice for lunch, dough-covered sweetened chestnuts for a snack — it was a recipe for disaster. And indeed that’s what I thought I’d be writing about for my first post upon my return. (I ate more noodles last week than I have in years.) But here’s...

To most people, eight days in Hawaii sounds like a dream.  And while I’m not a sit-on-the-beach kind of person at all — in fact, I hate both the sun and salt water — I am currently one of those people.  My husband and I are on Kauai right now, and there are enough activities — from hiking the Na Pali Coast to kayaking the Wailua River — to keep me very well entertained. But bringing diabetes to paradise is challenging. Most of my vacations tend to be in cities — or, if not urban areas, places...

I’m currently visiting a friend in Cincinnati, and am dealing with all the fun of traveling with diabetes — extra sensors, syringes, insulin, test strips. I don’t have any makeup, but by God, do I have a lot of extra triple A batteries. Anyway, this is my first time in Cincinnati and I’ve been intrigued by some of the food choices here. Like, for example, Skyline Chili, a restaurant where, as far as I can tell, everything comes with a scoop of chili on top of it. Hot dogs, French fries, baked potatoes —...