Diabetes Awareness on Huffington Post

Jan 15

Every November we celebrate Diabetes Awareness Month - is celebrate the right word? Anyway, there's nothing but blue circles as far as the eye can see, just as long as your eye can't see beyond the diabetes online community. After November ends you can be assured that there will be blog posts written that use phrases like, "We are just talking to ourselves" and even more that indicate that the choir is preaching to itself. We get sad that all of our effort didn't break the diabetes conversation wide open and we wonder why the NFL isn't wearing blue for diabetes?

Sound familiar?

I've been working behind the scenes to get real DOC based diabetes conversations/stories into mainstream media. It's a little too early to talk about a radio interview that looks like it will happen next month, but I can tell you today about one of my blog pieces that is running on Huffington Post Parents.

'I am not Diabetes' is featured on the Dads front page! Some love, shares and likes can push it to the front of HuffParents. My hope is that one day people will read about diabetes and understand it the way they do breast cancer and other more easily felt/understood diseases. My inclination is that when someone hears you have cancer, they immediately understand the situation that you are in. Diabetes, to the uninitiated is not so self-explanatory, but you know that.

Maybe they just need to feel a day with type I in the way that we do... I for one am happy to share what life is really like with diabetes, if it means bringing awareness to the next level. I'm not suggesting that I am the first person to do this, plenty of intrepid diabetes advocates are working tirelessly to get the word out. I'm just saying that maybe the world can handle hearing about diabetes in the way that we speak to each other about it. I'm not going to try and dress up Arden's story, or make it sound like it's been written by a NY Times reporter. I just want tell our real, raw stories until those football cleats turn blue.

The first step is to get this piece's popularity to a place where HuffPost will consider posting links on there Facebook page and then, hopefully, to the frontage of HuffParents. Please take a second, to like, share and comment so we can show the mainstream that the DOC has a voice that others would be interested in knowing more about.