Posted by on Monday 14 May 2012

DBlog Week Day 1 : Really? Me too!

Well it's that time of year again! Karen over at Bitter~Sweet has been busy organising the third annual Diabetes Blog Week. Today's topic is 'Find a friend' - a chance to point some of you in the direction of some corners of the DOC that perhaps you haven't yet discovered.

My choice was easy really. It's just not because Dave seems to be an all-round good egg. It's not just because he writes posts that make me smile and think, "Really? Me too!". It's not just because Dave is always to be seen encouraging others on Twitter, offering cheery advice and support. It's a connection which is more specifically a fluke of timing. It's an example of how the DOC works in making you feel less alone. Less isolated. More supported - even by people you have never met face to face.

Dave and I first bumped into each other via mutual Twitter contact and blogger BigPurpleDuck (Hi Emma!). She was enthusiatically recommending insulin pump therapy to me at the time and for a long time I was stubbornly resisting. It transpired that Dave was similarly unsure about the whole pump thing, and it was good (at that stage) to feel like I wasn't the only luddite in town. We'd been for diagnosed roughly the same amount of time, I think, and had many genuinely laugh-out-loud funny exchanges of tweets about the merits (or otherwise) of turning to the "dark side" of TeamPump.

Even though we were not really watching what each other were doing particularly closely, and just following our own clinic appointment timescales at different ends of the country we ended up, through an extraordinary fluke of timing, beginning on insulin pumps within a few days of each other. Which meant we could also compare notes about those first few weeks of the experience.

I'm not even sure Dave is aware of Diabetes Blog Week and don't think he is participating, but pop on over to The Tangerine Diabetic and say 'Hi'.

3 comments:

  1. Thank you Mike. I'm totally overwhelmed by this and rather cornily the feeling is mutual.

    The benefit of the DOC is that there's probably someone out there who's in a very similar situation to you. I feel very fortunate that even though I'd only just ventured into the twitter / blog world that I found someone as cynical and questioning as me and who was having similar reluctant Team pump thoughts.

    Thank you again for the mention and i suppose I'd better get a new piece written to give my new readers something to mock my grammar on!!

    Take care.
    Dave

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  2. You are very welcome! Maybe one of these years we'll get a chance to bump into each other at a ShootUp meet :)

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  3. And now I have two more blogs to add to my list.
    Nice to meet you!

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