Friends with Diabetes

It’s Diabetes Blog Week again . . . yay! The last couple years were great, helping me meet so many wonderful people online with diabetes (POWDs?). Once again, Karen has done a fantastic job creating the topics and organizing the logistics. Kudos to her! Today’s topic invites us to “find a friend”—or rather, to share a friend with you, the reader.

I have met so many wonderful people with diabetes through their websites, Twitter feeds, and Facebook posts, that I don’t feel right naming just a few names. I have been fortunate enough over the last 18 months to meet several of these wonderful people and even call some of them my very best of friends. They’re not just people who really get diabetes and are there to share the triumphs, disappointments, and everyday shenanigans that is blood glucose. No, they’re also wonderful people with lives and interests and passions, and they’re most interesting (to me) when they share those other, “normal people” parts.

There are, however, a few people I read everyday because (a) we’ve met in real life, had a wonderful time, and grown close afterward, (b) they post several times a week, and (c) if I miss a post, I’m missing out on what’s going on in my friends’ lives, the same way that I would if I’m on vacation and cut off from the normal connections that bind friends together. That is to say, there’s no difference between these Internet friends and the ones across town; we just communicate differently. So Céline, Jess, Kim, Scully, and Victoria, here’s hoping others get to know how awesome you are. (And Caroline, I would totally put you in this group, too, if only you posted more often. :^) [Update 23 May 2012: Oh! Here it is!])

There’s someone I’ve never met in person and whom I’ve only just recently started following online. I think y’all should give her posts a look. Scully introduced me to her fellow Team Type 1 rider Becky Furuta’s awesome blog, Avec Délectation. (Don’t worry, ‘Mericans; it’s at least 99.44% English.) She’s smart and funny and thought-provoking. Her posts prompt me to think differently about diabetes . . . more matter-of-factly, more holistically, more—I dunno—post-hippy-Boulderite-like. If that’s not a good enough reason for having the Diabetes Online Community around, I don’t know what is. Oh, she also likes pounding diabetes into the ground as she rides her bike fast. She’s my kinda gal. One day, we will have to meet.