Unaquescribe: Beads and the 'Beetus.

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Beads and the 'Beetus.

As much as I love interacting with the diabetes online community, I very much appreciate the offline opportunities I get to hang out, too. It's tough to beat the chance to be face-to-face; to wear our insulin pumps out in the open air; to compare glucose meters by some other way than holding them up to the ol' webcam.

Because diabetes gives you super powers, identities have been protected.
(Except that I'm the only non-Medtronic user in the bunch. Foiled!)

A few months back, I found a couple of ladies my age-ish who also have type 1 and live where I live. We met for dinner (it felt very much like a blind date, as we connected online first, and I brought them roses) (kidding, I didn't) and found that we clicked really well. We talked about a lot of things that night, and one sticking point was, "Why isn't there a support group here for adults with type 1?". (The local JDRF chapter has a kids group that has been going strong for several years, but the adults version never really took off, so they stopped.)

The conversation then transitioned to, "Well, we could always just start one..."

And so we did. We meet once a month, and we've grown our numbers a wee bit. Not everyone comes each month, and not everyone who RSVP's shows up, but that's okay. We're providing the resource we wished had been there for us, and it needs some time to grow. It's kind of like that Gandhi quote, if I may get all philosophical for a moment: "Be the change you want to see in the world". It might as well be us, right?

Last night we met at a bead store (not a bread store, much to Amanda's chagrin) and made some jewelry - some of us made medical IDs, and some of us made the normal stuff. We even got to do some advocacy, as the store owner had many questions for us about what type of diabetes we had, how insulin pumps work, and what we can or cannot eat. Boy, did she ask the right people...