Diabetes Blog – Happy-Medium.net

Before today’s post, I want to let you know that I’ll be listening in on a health activist roundtable presented by WEGO Health on Friday, November 9th at Noon EST. I don’t know who will be on the panel, but I’m guessing there will be at least a couple of your favorite rock-star bloggers. Look for tweets by @WEGOHealth. You can follow along with the discussion on Twitter by going to http://tweetchat.com/room/hachat

Now on to the show!

In the past week or so, I’ve been reading a lot (at least to me it seems like a lot) of posts from PWDs telling their stories about being diagnosed. I must confess: I can’t stop reading them.

Like the proverbial race fan who only goes to the track to see the cars crash, I have to read them all. I’m hanging on every word, and I can’t turn away until I’ve read every last detail about someone’s bad experience with a doctor, or someone’s parents dealing with the diagnosis of their child.

Why? Why am I so intrigued by one of the saddest days in someone life?

I think (read: I hope) some of it has to do with the two things that People With Diabetes are blessed with: empathy and resilience. Let’s look at them one at a time:

Empathy. Once you’ve been cursed by the big D, you never look at another’s struggles the same way. Simply put, we don’t want another man, woman, or child to go through what we’ve gone through. And when we do see another diagnosis, we feel the same sadness, the same anger all over again. We want to do something about it. Every day I’m amazed at how much is being done to raise money, increase awareness, and provide grass roots support for all of us.

Resilience. When you consider where a lot of these stories begin, it’s uplifting to see how far all of us have come. Diabetes is difficult, it’s frustrating, it’s a full-time-never-ending-no-good-backstabbing-kick-you-when-you’re-down thing that never lets up. Yet we live real lives, with plenty of successes to go with the failure of our pancreases. Every day, PWDs are proving that we can do everything anyone else can do except produce insulin. Yeah… that is uplifting.

So if I take a particular interest in your diagnosis story, please don’t think I’m wacky. I want to support you. I want to be enlightened. I want to be uplifted and empowered.

Thank you for telling your story.