The Corner Booth

We were out at dinner the other night, sitting at the bar in our local brewpub and talking about nothing in particular. Really, the conversation was really all over the place, turning to whatever was on the mind at the time. Since we're regulars there, one of the owners knows that we're from Detroit and I'm a big Detroit sports fan. He enjoys the simple fun of buying old-school baseball card packs, and he gives me any Detroit Tiger cards that he happens to get. That night, he brought me two cards. And that brought up a conversation about the latest baseball happenings, including how Detroit Tiger pitcher Max Scherzer had recently left for the Washington Nationals, and he and his wife put a pretty cool ad in the Detroit Free Press thanking the franchise and fans for his years in D-town. We both realized we hadn't seen the actual ad, only saw a news story about it. And so, I turned to my smartphone to check out that ad. And afterward, I happened to glance at Facebook...

I am no longer surprised by the delays and lack of common sense from those who send me diabetes supplies. Really, it's become an expectation that chaos and frustration are par for the course every time I try to fill a prescription by mail order. My latest mail order nightmare involves the notorious Express Scripts, the third-party benefits manager that my insurer Anthem BCBS requires me to go through. Thanks to a busy work schedule and travel last fall, I overlooked my calendar reminder in November and was late trying to refill my Rx for test strips just before the holidays rang in. It ended up taking 31 days from start to finish to get the strips I so desperately needed, and today I'm going to tell you the story of how that went down. Let me start by noting that I'm no stranger to the steps required for these types of prescription fills. I've been at this a while. It's no secret that you have to always jump through hoops like obtaining doctor sign-off ...

This is the tale of finding a fellow insulin pumper in the wild. It was a Wednesday night, and I was supposed to be at a diabetes camp board meeting being held on the opposite end of town about 45 minutes from where I live. Thanks to some pressing work tasks that day I left later than planned, and heavy traffic at the start of rush-hour delayed my being able to get up to that part of Indy. Actually, by the time I made the longer-than-expected drive, it wasn't even worth going to the meeting. And since I hadn't eaten all day and my mind was fried, I decided to stop off for some dinner before driving home after rush hour. I made my way into a Buffalo Wild Wings, and since it wasn't yet the 5 o'clock hour, the bar was pretty empty. I made my way up to one of the seats with a good view of both big screen TVs, and was all ready to just sit and relax. The nice bartender girl welcomed me and within a couple minutes I'd snagged a cheap pint of name-your-big-name-...

Imagine just being able to fire up an inkjet printer and print out perfectly usable glucose test strips. Ah, the money that could be saved, among other things! It may seem off-the-wall strange, but a startup company that began almost three years ago as a Clemson University student research project in South Carolina, Accessible Diagnostics , is developing what it calls GlucoSense, a new type of test strip made out of commonly-available materials that costs just pennies to make in comparison to what’s out there now. We also happened to hear of a Bangalore company developing silk-weaved strips featured in a recent NPR story , with hopes of rolling out their offering by year’s end. These efforts come at a time when both health care costs and the rates of diabetes are skyrocketing in the U.S. and around the world — meaning more people than ever need glucose strips, while fewer have affordable access these essential diabetes supplies. Since GlucoSense is led by in large...

I have to be honest, Nightscout is awesome. It's great having my CGM in the Cloud and being able to share that blood sugar data with others, and giving myself more access to viewing my data when and where I want in a form that helps me. First impressions were strongly positive, and I stand by all of that. Additional observations, from my first six weeks of using my "early Christmas gift" strapped to my waist and wrist: The alerts annoy me at 80 and 180. I'd prefer 70 and 200. -- ( UPDATE : I have learned, thanks to Sara , that a Pebble update allows me to customize alert ranges -- so that's awesome!!!) Most of the time, I keep my Pebble on "Quiet Mike" mode which uses a CGM Sleep Mode watchface created by a fellow Nightscouter. But when not quiet, I've seen the tighter range makes me work harder to stay in that range and have tighter control just to avoid the annoying vibrations. Interesting... Recent trip to California was a big test driv...

There was a time when keeping on top of my diabetes management was more fairytale than real life. Checking my blood sugars wasn't a common occurrence. Carb counting wasn't around thanks to my 2 or more shots a day, in the morning and evening, so it came down to a more stringent style of meal planning. And as my docs often said, I wasn't "compliant." At some point in my 20s, I grew up. Well, to be accurate: I started growing up. That came in waves. And it's still a work in progress to some degree. But that's when I started accepting and embracing the fact that my diabetes wasn't going anywhere, that I wasn't destined for doom, and I could do something about it in the here and now. That sense of hopelessness still existed, but it became like a toy that I could put into a box and pack away in the closet. Every so often that toy would reappear, but not as often as it once did. What changed? For the most part, it was because I found inspirat...

Months or even years from now, I wonder if the pancreatically-challenged community will be asking: "Where were you, the day the Diabetes Community crashed the FDA's webcast system?" Yes, that appears to have happened this past Monday. So many people tuned in for the first-ever virtual town hall discussion between the D-Community and FDA, that the agency's ability to livestream the three-hour meeting online slowed and eventually crashed. And it wasn't only our diabetes dialogue... it seems the FDA's entire network of webcast meetings shut down for a couple hours at least. OK, that's not technically official yet; the IT gurus within the regulatory agency are still trying to determine the exact cause and moment it happened (about 90 minutes in), but so far FDA leadership believes that we were indeed the cause, since it was essentially like having a massive crowd all trying to peer through a tiny little window at the same time. So needless to say, there was a ...