My husband is having difficulty at work with discrimination because of his diabetes. He has been pumping for about three months now. I have searched the advocate anti-discrimination act and have only gotten little help.

I expect that you will receive several responses to your question; but it seemed to me that perhaps you were seeking a legal remedy for the perceived discrimination. I would like to suggest that you talk this problem over first with your husband’s physician or perhaps better still with the medical social worker on his diabetic team. I say this because using a pump is basically the most unobtrusive way there is of maintaining control and because for the most part diabetes is a condition that engenders sympathy.

Common factors that may provoke an opposite response are taking blood samples for blood sugars in public or talking too much about the problems of being diabetic. Also if being diabetic is used manipulatively to avoid certain tasks that have to be born disproportionately by colleagues or if some clinical occurrence like frequent hypoglycemia has the same result. In short, I think you and your husband need to define what is triggering the discrimination and to make a plan, if necessary with the help of management, to deal with it without confrontation.

SB