Your Stories Matter

AmyT at Diabetes Mine started a post about Feeling Displaced which turned into a heated discussion about the attitude people with diabetes have online.

Well one of the responses got me thinking...

Terry: "When you find us tugging on people's sleeves and bitching out loud to non-diabetics on a constant basis about how bad we've got it or how misunderstood we are, THEN you can call us cry-babies. Otherwise we're just our own little club with our own language and concerns. Let us have our whiny fun."

Terry makes an interesting point.

As a non-diabetic, I never ever cared to know what diabetes even was. But stumbling upon Diabetes Mine and countless others has opened my eyes to something that's actually a BIG deal. Do you think people would care about the AIDS epidemic if they didn't talk about it all the time in the school system? Do you think that finding out someone had Cancer would have the same shock if it wasn't always perceived as so "deadly".

There's a problem with diabetes awareness because it is both an epidemic and a very deadly disease yet it hardly gets the attention of something that is either.

All it took was 1 guy traveling the world with a drug-resistant strain of Tuberculosis to grasp the nations attention in fear. Yet something like diabetes doesn't even need to be spread, it doesn't discriminate, and can affect virtually anyone.

People just don't seem to care if they don't think it ever affects them... and that's a deadly misconception about diabetes. I'm always grateful to have found the online diabetes community and everyone's contribution in helping me learn more. Your every day stories are reality. That's a reality that helps remove the ignorance that keeps the rest of us oblivious (until it's too late).

So until a real cure comes around... keep sharing, crying, laughing and whining to your heart's content.