Every once in a while you deserve the right to take a day or two off from your work, whether it’s from a job or a school, to relax and forget about the daily grind and routine. But this is such luxury which people who suffer from chronic illnesses like Type 1 Diabetes cannot afford – neither the patients themselves nor the family looking after or supporting them. Managing the condition is a full time job 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Not a single day off. Not one.
Sometimes you wish you could take just that one day off to feel ‘normal’. Eat what you like without worrying about carb counting, walk barefoot on the beach without worrying about getting cuts on your feet or just sleep as long as you want to without having to wake up and check your blood sugar levels or do your injections. Just for one day.
New developments to find a cure for diabetes look promising, such as the discovery of how to grow insulin-producing cells by Harvard University scientists. But the absolute, definite cure is still years away in the future. In the meantime, the focus on lessening the burden of diabetes management through artificial pancreas provides a glimmer of hope; being able to take that one day off from diabetes and achieve a degree of normalcy may not be wishful thinking anymore.
November is diabetes awareness month culminating in the World Diabetes Day on the 14th day of the month. This one day puts continued focus on driving awareness and advocacy for the condition and ultimately to finding the elusive cure. We can all play a part in this by supporting and helping the global diabetes community spread the word so that the day we are hoping for will come sooner rather than later – one day.
To find out more about the World Diabetes Day click here.
Tag: World Diabetes Day
It’s hard. But sometimes you find things make you feel…a little hopeful.
So this month–this week, actually, I think–marks the 16th anniversary of my diagnosis with type 1 diabetes.
Tonight I stumbled across this post (I almost reblogged it, but one of the pictures seems to be not actually for World Diabetes day, according to Google Image Search; the post also only highlighted type 1, and World Diabetes Day is for all people with diabetes, not just those with type 1) and I just cried. Because lighting up monuments for World Diabetes Day is something I didn’t know about, and the fact that people would agree to do that for a chronic illness that is too often reviled and misunderstood…I don’t have a word for how that makes me feel. “Touched” isn’t strong enough. Neither is “moved” any other word that might be used for it.
There are no words only tears of deep gratitude that someone in charge of the care of these monuments would be willing to do this, whatever their personal thoughts or motives might have been.
It seems like such a little thing, but it’s huge to me.
Here’s an article from 2007 about the first World Diabetes Day that has more pictures of more monuments.
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