There is just no getting around it.  Daily BG testing and fine tuning are essential to achieving an actual healthy HbA1c value.  What’s more important than a HbA1C value is ultimately, what gets you there and how all those Blood Glucose (BG) values stack up, according to a leading diabetes health care practitioner. Most patients would agree that maintaining a healthy HbA1c is a difficult balancing act.  If patients stacked every BG number up over a three month period and took an average, would that number actually reflect a real...

I always imagine that diabetics who work in offices have a relatively easy time dealing with low blood sugar. If they start to feel shaky or sweaty, they can get up, go to the bathroom, test, and then return to their seats–perhaps drinking some juice or munching on chocolate if they did in fact have a low blood sugar reading. The diabetic could be so inconspicuous that his or her coworkers might be completely unaware that the person sitting one cubicle over has a medical condition at all. I work as a cashier in a large bookstore,...

I’ve got an interview up today with Dan Hurley, author of the new book, Diabetes Rising — and wanted to write a quick blog post to mention one of my favorite parts of the book: Hurley’s ear for analogies for life with diabetes that are so spot-on that I made my husband listen as I read them out loud. Consider this simile, courtesy of a systems engineer working on the software to control a closed-loop insulin pump, about why controlling blood sugar is so difficult — especially since, as Hurley points out, it...

As my friends know, I am a huge dork — especially when it comes to language. Thanks to some excellent middle and high school Latin teachers (and subsequent stints as a Latin teacher myself), I have an obsessive need to break down words into their roots. Did you know, for example, that spiro is Latin for “breathe” — and is the root for words like inspire (to breathe into), expire (to breathe out), conspire (to breathe together) and perspire (to breathe through)? Did you know that limin is Latin for threshold,...

There’s a lot of guilt involved in parenting, and I tend to find myself feeling guilty even over small things, like telling my sons a white lie in order to do something beneficial for them.  Last night, for example, as I kissed six-year-old Guy goodnight, he said, “Come check me every five minutes all night.”  I didn’t know what he was afraid of at that moment, but I knew that he needed to sleep, and the best thing I could do was to reassure him that I’d check him all night long, and let him drift off into sleep...

My husband’s out of town right now on business, and in addition to making me miss him, it’s also making me realize that this is one of the first times since I was diagnosed with Type 1 nearly nine years ago that I’ve spent a substantial number of nights alone. When I was diagnosed, I was still in college — and lived with a roommate. After college, I lived briefly with my parents, and then moved in with more roommates. A succession of house shares followed, and then I moved in with my boyfriend, who’s...

We would like to be able to know who will develop type 1 diabetes long before it happens and have a treatment ready that will stop it from happening. This is a tall order and the path to this goal is not a short one. However, an important step along this path was recently accomplished and the results published in this month’s issue of Immunity. The question addressed by this study is whether T cells which infiltrate the pancreas recognize pancreatic antigens or whether they don’t. Why does this matter? Well, it boils down to...