Diabetes Week – let’s talk

Fame at last. Like all good things – sausages, vegetarians, homeopathy and compost are amongst the terrifying collection of “awareness weeks” listed in the UK – we diabetics have our own week. And it’s now.

My initial assumption was this week meant it was obligatory for all those with a working pancreas to live the life of a diabetic for a week. Apparently though this isn’t the case as in the past this has led to a national shortage of fruit pastilles and was environmentally catastrophic when the whole country had to put their sheets on a hot wash at the same time to get rid of the blood stains.

So, we’re still the only ones playing at being pancreases, but it does mean the media will talk about us a bit, people will be sponsored to jump out of planes/walk/run/paraglide etc in our honour and hopefully by the end of the week a few more people will be slightly less ignorant about the whole diabetes thing and the charitable coffers will be slightly healthier.

This year, everyone’s second favourite diabetes charity, Diabetes UK, are encouraging people to talk about diabetes  for diabetes week. They’re trying to “raise awareness of the importance of talking about diabetes” which doesn’t seem a bad thing. I have been known to talk about the diabetes a little bit myself and I have to admit, I don’t do it for particularly altruistic reasons. I mostly talk about it because I find it the best way of dealing with it. Far better than keeping it all in my head.

So, in the spirit of talking I have two questions for you. Firstly, do you have any exciting plans for Diabetes Week? And secondly, are you comfortable talking about your diabetes or do you prefer to keep it a secret. There is a fatal flaw in this question in that the commenters will all say they’re comfortable and the lurkers will not be and will therefore continue to lurk, but let’s give it a go anyway!