About

I was diagnosed with Type One Diabetes, as a teenager, in November 1998. A sociable, demanding, even high achieving girl, diabetes suited the woman I thought I could be. But it is a lonely disease, it demands more than I could achieve. For the first 13 years the diabetes and my life felt together but apart.

Diabetes is swan like: on the surface I am a historian, gliding through London, with dance, gardening, theatre, writing gracing my feathers. Underneath, however, there is a paddling frenzy that is drowning in the merky waters of insulin-ratios, carb-counting, cannula changes, hypos, hypers, hormonal fluctuations and new medicines.

Until I was 28 I worked hard to get only ok A1Cs. Never below 6.9. Never above 8.2. I’d read interviews with people with diabetes or briefly encountered other people with Type One in waiting-rooms, the daily-struggle or the intense elation that hovers in the mind of a person with diabetes was edited out. It never felt personal. I’d go online, but information felt sterile and forums felt stilted. In 2012 I started using twitter to talk to other people with Type One. For the first time in thirteen years I felt that my diabetes was part of my life, not the other way round. I wasn’t having to use a diabetic-specific app. I wasn’t having to hide it to talk about the things I loved. I could just talk about it as part of my life and the diabetic/diabetes online community #DOC understood.

So this blog is a diary of just that, it attempts to talk about my diabetes as part of me, not  apart from me.