I don’t know about you, but if I were going to take diabetes advice I would be more likely to take it from someone who is living with diabetes themselves. At the age of 10, my mum and I went to the doctor following me having a cold for a week. On the spot my doctor diagnosed me with type 1 diabetes and told us to go straight to the hospital. The only other things I remember her saying was that I was likely to have a limb amputated one day, that I could go blind and that it would be difficult for me to have children. My mum was the most affected by this diagnosis; all I heard and was terrified about was that you have to stay in hospital, I just wanted to go home! My mum threw herself into finding out everything she could about type 1 diabetes so that she could take the best care of me and teach me the right things. The doctor continued to be of no help, she didn’t offer any useful books to read and didn’t really offer any valuable information. I did meet a wonderful Endocrinologist at the time who helped us through this hard transition and a couple of fantastic nurses but the hospital stay was purely to learn how to do my own injections, this took one week; my doctor told me I could not leave the hospital until I was doing my own injections. Ever since I was a child I have tested my blood glucose levels independently and have done insulin injections first with needles and vials and then with insulin pens. I made the difficult decision to convert to an insulin pump in 2012 when I commenced work as a full time Registered Nurse and I have never looked back. In my life I have lanced my fingers 75,000+ times, I have injected my arms, legs and abdomen more than 30,000 times and I have changed my insulin infusion set more than 512 times. It is due to this doctor’s compassionless and apathetic treatment of me that I am thankful for her. Without her, I would not have been driven to make a diagnosis of diabetes a better experience for others. This doctor motivated me to become a Diabetes Educator; to be an empathetic Diabetes Educator who has sat in the same chair being diagnosed with diabetes, to be a Diabetes Educator who understands exactly what it feels like when you are told you have to inject yourself with insulin every day for the rest of your life, to be someone who could answer questions in a way people understood, to be somebody who could give you useful resources to help you understand in your own time and to understand that you may have questions at odd times of the day, to be a Diabetes Educator who understands that you think about everything in a day in relation to your diabetes and how it will be affected, a Diabetes Educator who understands that you think about many things in the future and how they will be affected by your diabetes. That is who I am today.
