The unveiling

The internet was designed with people with ME in mind. I live to vent. I NEED to rant. The focus of my frustration and ire is USUALLY Type One Diabetes, though I do have other irritants. I was diagnosed in 1974, but never really found an OUTLET for my rants until until I moved to NYC in 1997.  When I got there, I had no friends or support system, and there wasn't even a live insulin support group. But, thanks to a Type One friend named Buddy, I found Insulin-pumpers.org, which was one of the very FIRST Diabetes Online Communities - when I joined, there were fewer than 200 members, and the format was very old school, bulletin board style postings and responses. But there it was... a place to ask questions, share experiences, compare notes, rant with abandon and find all sorts of solace, whether it be about my latest run in with Nurse Ratchet, or the current retinopathy woe. Insulin-pumpers was the first to fill this very definite need, and gave me a place  for my voice. Better than  anonymous AOL chat rooms, I found penpals, advisers, listeners, and eventually true and lasting friends. They even gave me a nickname, Sara Smarty Pants, hence the SSP.

Ever since I started posting (voraciously, I might add) there, I've kept a logs of all my posts, thinking someday I would go "to the village newspaper and gather into a book the" words I wrote. Back then, the only books of note were John Walsh's Pumping Insulin (of which I have a first edition) and the Barbara Davis Center's Dr. Chase's Pink Panther book, Understanding Diabetes, (which I got when I was a patient there in the early 80s). But I never did, and over the years, others have  published awesome, insightful books, so why would the world need ANOTHER book about diabetes, so I left it in the blog. I never shared these postings beyond Insulin Pumpers, because I just thought no one would care.

But NOW, after attending the #Masterlab seminar at Friends for Life in Orlando this past summer, thanks to the Diabetes Hands Foundation, and being inspired to share my thoughts and words and baloney by You Can Do This, Kerri , Kim, Scott, A Sweet Life, Cherise, Kelly, and Alecia, I've decided to put it out there and see if anyone even notices. Just a little at a time, since I need to spell check it, and fix some punctuation. OK, alot of punctuation. I hate rules, particularly those having to do with grammar, punctuation and diabetes, as you will see if you read any of this. And I have a full time job. I mean in addition to my diabetes. And my dog, Lulu.  So, this will come out a few posts at a time...And we will see if it has a place in the world. For me, it is kind of a retrospective of where I was, and where I am now. It has been really interesting reading this stuff, at least to me, to see how far things have come.

So...welcome to the Borg, as we used to refer to getting started on an insulin pump. "Resistance is futile. You have been assimilated."