The Cost.

Something Jeffrey Brewer said at JDRF Government Day has been rolling around in my head.

It was something small; one point among many in his speech. My memory won't allow me to quote him verbatim, but I think I can get fairly close.

"Living with diabetes is much tougher now, in some ways, than it ever has been. In the years before modern insulins and glucose testing, you took one, maybe two shots a day, and that was it. Now you have blood tests and insulin pumps and CGM data serving as constant reminders of the disease. It's something you're always thinking about. Something you can't escape from analyzing." - Kim, channeling Mr. Brewer

He made sure to qualify that point by saying that technology is certainly a good thing - many of us are in far better health than we'd be if this were, say, 1962. The tools we have now enable us to be healthier than any past generations of diabetics ever had a chance at. We can be grateful, so grateful, for that.

But the other side of that is its cost. The mental cost.

A CGM doesn't let you forget. It buzzes; it beeps. It needs a calibration. It tells you you're dropping. It reminds you you're still above 200.

It's always there, chirping at you: "Hey, you still have diabetes!"

All of the correction boluses, the precise insulin measurements, the tailoring of basal rates, the tightened glycemic goals, the post-prandial levels, the aim for those pretty A1C numbers... they help and hurt, all at once.

Mr. Brewer emphasized that one of JDRF's goals is to lessen that mental cost for those of us with diabetes. He, too, would like to see the day where people with diabetes don't have that relentless reminder at all hours of every day. Where we can, using the technology available now and into the future, go back to not really thinking about it. Where we can take all of the time and energy we've put into our diabetes care, and focus that into another worthy cause.

This is the kind of thing that helped me decide that JDRF's new CEO "totally gets it".

And it gives me hope.