Twitter and Diabetes

So I guess I didn't scare you off, huh? Good! Welcome back!

If you’re on Twitter, you’ve probably seen all of the avatars with Santa hats on them. If you don’t have a Santa hat yet, @JaimieH will put one on your avatar for you and she’s asking for a small $1.50 donation which will be forwarded to TuDiabetes.com to support research for a cure.

(Correction: Manny from TuDiabetes pointed out that the funds are not to support research for a cure. The mission of TuDiabetes is to help connect people touched by diabetes and that TuDiabetes helps raise awareness about all the great work done by teams funded by JDRF, DRI and others like Dr. Faustman’s. Thanks for the clarification, Manny!)

After I found out about this, I went to visit the TuDiabetes site and discovered that its a Ning social networking group for people with diabetes or people who have a friend or relative with diabetes. So I joined and I added the link to our Cafe Press store where Bubba and I sell items with both our walk team logo and a “Cure Diabetes” ribbon on them. All proceeds from the sales go to the JDRF.

Anyway, with all of this talk about diabetes lately, I wanted to share a story that I had left as a comment on a BlogHer post about World Diabetes Day which you can view here.

Here’s the comment I left:

My son is a diabetic

He was diagnosed on my 30th birthday. The whole night is still a fuzzy memory but for some reason I can remember watching the Oscars on a little TV. It was the year Julia Roberts had that beehive-like hairdo and the vintage gown.

He was 8 years old. Now he’s almost 16. So in just a few months, he will have lived half of his life as a juvenile diabetic.

Its been a rough road. Seizures, ambulance rides, hospital stays. His dad even tried to use it as an excuse to take my son away from me, blaming me for every incident that happens when my son is with me yet finding excuses for the things that happened when he has him.

The worst incident was shortly after he had gone on the insulin pump and we had traveled out of town for a baseball tournament. My son was so ill from high blood sugar that we just couldn’t seem to bring down that he did nothing but sleep and vomit. He was about 12 years old and had lost about 15 pounds from his already skinny little body. As I held him in my lap in the emergency room, shocked at how much he resembled a victim of the Holocaust, he looked up at me and asked “Mom am I going to die?”

No mother should ever be asked that question.

Fortunately we have hope. We have news from the JDRF and the medical community that progress is being made. I’ve heard about gadgets that can be implanted into the body – one that reads blood sugar levels, one that dispenses insulin – that communicate with each other and keep insulin levels steady. I’ve heard of pancreas transplants. I’ve heard a lot of promising news.

My son is a very intelligent young man. He’s planning to go to college to become a veterinarian. Right now he’s trying to find a part-time job or even a volunteer position at a vet clinic or hospital. He reads books on quantum physics for fun. He’s sarcastic and he’s inherited my twisted sense of humor. I’m introducing him to the world of blogging. He named his “Prick My Finger” which is a play on words from him being diabetic and from a George Carlin bit. (Told ya he got his sense of humor from me.)

Most moms want to live to see their children get married, to have grandchildren. While I do hope to live long enough to witness all of those milestones, I have one more: I hope to live long enough to see a cure for diabetes.

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Tags: Bubba, diabetes

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