Launching into the blogsphere

Yeah, I like newsgroups a lot better, because they're interactive. I'm too old to think talking to yourself in public is normal. But "young folks nowadays" aren't hanging in newsgroups any more and even I can see that the blog thing isn't going to go away. So here goes . . .

I've already put most of what I've learned over 8 years of contending with medical imbecility relative to Diabetes on my web site, "What they Don't Tell You about Diabetes". What I'm going to do here is comment from time to time on the latest media blither about diabetes and, where possible, shed some light on what the press releases might have left out. Some of it could save your life.

Beside that, well, it's a blog. So there needs to be some self-indugent ruminations. Right? So I'll post about about my own battle to keep control, which by now involves depressing amounts of dietary regulation, insulin, and do-it-yourself doctoring, since the kind of Diabetes I have turns out to be something that only a small group of specialists in the UK seem to know anything about: MODY.

Brief explanation : MODY have genetic bizarrities that mean they go completely out of control unless they use tiny doses of insulin or sulfonylurea drugs--doses the size of what you'd give the average diabetic house cat. MODYs are also rare, so you can run into endos (as I have) who have never had a patient with one before and think you are simply a nutter when you tell them that you hypoed on 6 units of Lantus--until they see the nonfasting glucose test where you went over 200 mg/dl with a full load of metformin and show normal C-peptide levels. Then show them how 4 units of basal dropped your fasting glucose 20 mg/dl and they move you from the "nuts" to "wierd" category, which, believe it or not, is an improvement.

So I'll post a bit about what it takes to keep my blood sugar in control and how MODY works. Every couple weeks I seem to learn something new about it, and if I can pass it on, well that seems worth doing!