CWD News
Why Attend Friends for Life
Friends for Life is an experience that can be difficult to describe; the closest that I can come up with is “diabetes camp on steroids,” but it doesn’t truly capture all the magic that happens every summer during Friends for Life Orlando. When Friends for Life started, the idea was for families to come together who really understand what life with diabetes is like. What it has become is something uniquely tailored for people with diabetes and their loved ones. Making Connections One of the main goals of CWD (Children with Diabetes) is to help people feel supported in their […]
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A Diabetes Mom with a Thousand Hugs
Diabetes moms—we are like regular moms, but we are different. Watching your child receive a diagnosis of type 1 diabetes elevates you to a whole new level of motherhood and I’m almost certain that this chapter…the one about diabetes…was left out of all of the manuals that I read when I was preparing to become a mother for the first time. Many of you may know that the day that my three-year-old daughter was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, I discovered Children with Diabetes while browsing the internet looking for answers to help me sort out the grief, frustration, worry, […]
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Stress and BG’s
The amount of stress that we have undergone as humans in the last few years has been ridiculous. This is certainly not how I imagined I would be spending my adult life. It feels like every chance we get to come up for a breath after drowning in major horrible world event after major horrible world event, another awful thing happens. Even reading the word stress makes my heart rate go up. Stress & BGs When you experience stress – even if it’s positive stress – it can raise your blood glucose levels. This is because our bodies react in […]
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TSA PreCheck and Teenagers
Thirteen years old. Teenagers. Last year, my twins became teenagers and I’m still in disbelief that we’ve all made it this far relatively unscathed. Along the way, we’ve added one diabetes diagnosis and one autism diagnosis. We’ve picked up three guinea pigs, two robo hamsters, one diabetes alert dog, one “regular” dog, and a partridge in a pear tree. It’s been a wild ride and it feels like we are just getting started. I’ve always said that my kids are “growing up in Friends for Life” and are helping to be raised by their CWD family. Each year when we […]
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Sick Day Guidelines 2023
Now that we have all emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us are rebuilding our immune system. This means we are catching all the germs our kids are bringing home from school, our coworkers are bringing into work, and whatever else our body catches. Since we were all isolated for so long, a lot of our body’s antibodies aren’t as effective as they once were. Here are the latest guidelines for sick-day management for people with diabetes. *Note – if you are a caregiver/parent, replace “you” with “your child.” Monitoring Glucose and Ketones For sick days, monitoring blood glucose […]
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What are Biosimilar Insulins?
“Wow! Look! They gave me six vials of insulin! FOR FREE! I paid nothing!” I vividly remember the first time in my adult life that I didn’t have to worry about the amount of insulin I had through my insurance. I came home and told my husband that. His reply was so poignant and true, “that’s like me being excited for oxygen.” I remember being afraid to leave the pharmacy in case they were going to mail me a multi-thousand-dollar bill later and asked the pharmacist twice before leaving, “Are you sure?” And I remember her understanding my fear. Everybody […]
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Do you Gluroo?
When Greg Badros’s son was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, his family quickly embraced diabetes technology, including a CGM and mobile apps. But what they found is that they didn’t have a good way of tracking multiple diabetes devices’ data with multiple caregivers. Luckily for other parents and loved ones of people with diabetes, Greg knew how to design software to help fill this much-needed gap. So, he developed Gluroo, a mobile app to help you log and track all things related to diabetes that affect families. Using Gluroo There are some devices or requirements needed to use GluRoo, but […]
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Friends for Life Seattle 2023 Recap
You’re going to have to slow down! I shouted this phrase while basically jogging behind my Children with Diabetes staff colleagues as we walked down the steep streets of Seattle. Slow down! It’s ironic, actually, because for the last several weeks, all that I’ve wanted is for time to speed up so that we could gather together in Seattle for Friends for Life. Hurry up … just to slow down. It feels like we spend a lot of our diabetes lives in the “hurry up” mode and rarely take time for the “slow down” part of our lives. Because, truly, […]
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Manual Mode
For the last five weeks, I have been doing multiple daily injections (MDI). This was the longest time that I have ever been on MDI in my life. After years of twice-daily split-mixed injections with regimented routines of breakfast – snack – lunch – snack – dinner – snack, I opted to get an insulin pump at age eleven because I wanted to sleep in on the weekends. I have been using a pump of some sort ever since for a total of 24 years so far. I decided to try basal-bolus injections around eight years ago because I had […]
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Latest Research on Women with Diabetes
Did you know that women and girls have been repeatedly excluded from research throughout history? In fact, after thousands of babies were born with severe birth defects from a medication for morning sickness, the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) banned women from participating in research if they were able to get pregnant.1 It’s understandable to want to prevent severe birth defects from happening to thousands of babies again, but that does not mean that women should be excluded from research. The challenge now is that there remains a large gap in research about women in general, but luckily there are many […]
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