World Diabetes Day (the weekend edition)

It's World Diabetes Day (plus two) and I've been to several sites on the net reading superbly written blog and vlog posts. Kudos to my friend George for putting his thoughts to song.

My overwhelming thought today concerns the amount of time this disease robs from lives. To borrow an analogy from my programming days, living with diabetes is like a task on your computer, constantly consuming precious, limited resources. Most of the time idling quietly, basically unseen, in the background, other times jumping quickly do the foreground and hogging the CPU.

In the background I take care of things like, how I'm feeling, did I do something because I'm nervous or is my sugar low or do I need a drink (of water) because I'm high or am I just plain thirsty. Throughout the course of the day, D jumps to the foreground: when testing, calculating carbs, bolusing; or when I'm sick, it becomes an all comsuming resource hog while I attempt to drive down a high and stop my system from sliding down the ketone slope.

I also think about where society could be if PWDs weren't consumed with diabetes management tasks or where we could be individually if we didn't have this time commitment. As I look back over the past forty years I fear diabetes has taken a toll on my personal life, especially in the early years. Before blood glucose monitoring, my sugars and probably everyone of that era, our levels were bouncing like a superball dropped off a four story building. How can a PWD possibly maintain focus and make clear decisions with this kind of activity going on in their systems?

Of course this whole thought process is futile, at least in the short term, as we are likely to be dealing with diabetes for the foreseeable future. Diabetes is the hand many of us have been dealt. It's important to play it to the best of our ability, regardless of the time commitment. The time invested will hopefully pay big dividends in the form of a long and healthy life. However, I'd just as soon live a long and healthy life without diabetes. Let's find a cure.